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While federal workers go without pay, senior Trump officials get big raises

Shutdown allows raises to go into effect
Shutdown allows raises to go into effect
Because of the federal government shutdown, Vice President Mike Pence’s yearly salary is scheduled to rise from $230,700 to $243,500.

WASHINGTON – While many federal workers go without pay and the government is partially shut down, hundreds of senior Trump political appointees are poised to receive annual raises of about $10,000 a year.

The pay raises for Cabinet secretaries, deputy secretaries, top administrators and even Vice President Mike Pence are scheduled to go into effect beginning Jan. 5 without legislation to stop them, according to documents issued by the Office of Personnel Management and experts in federal pay.

The raises appear to be an intended consequence of the shutdown: When lawmakers failed to pass bills on Dec. 21 to fund multiple federal agencies, they allowed an existing pay freeze to lapse. Congress enacted a law capping pay for top federal executives in 2013 and renewed it each year.

The raises will occur because that cap will expire without legislative action by Saturday, allowing raises that have accumulated over those years but never took effect to kick in, starting with paychecks issued next week.

Cabinet secretaries, for example, would be entitled to a jump in annual salary from $199,700 to $210,700. Deputy secretaries would be entitled to a raise from $179,700 to $189,600. Others affected are under secretaries, deputy directors and other top administrators.

Pence’s pay is scheduled to rise from $230,700 to $243,500.

There was no immediate comment Friday by the White House.

The government payroll system has yet to implement the pay raise for executives including the vice president, a Congressional aide said. But given the hardships that budget impasse imposes on the rest of the country, “the optics of this are not pretty,” said Jeffrey Neal, a former personnel executive at the Department of Homeland Security and now a senior vice president at ICF.

Some 800,000 federal employees, out of a workforce of 2.1 million, are in unpaid status due to the partial government shutdown that began last month. Of those, about 380,000 have been furloughed. Many others are working without pay, and just before the new year, President Donald Trump ordered a pay freeze for most federal workers, working or not.

“I suspect the president isn’t aware of the disparity – that political appointees will get a pay raise and no one else will,” said John Palguta, former career executive in the federal government for human resources. “It’s going to be seen as terribly unfair.”