memo

The memo is seen as a pressure tactic on Democrats as the US government shutdown heads into its eighth day.

The White House is attempting to challenge a legal precedent that grants automatic back pay to hundreds of thousands of furloughed federal workers at the end of a government shutdown, according to media reports.

A new White House memo claims that the US Congress must specifically earmark funding for furloughed workers, under a new interpretation of the “Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019”, according to the US news outlet Axios.

Axios reported the news on Tuesday evening in the US, citing a memo from the Office of Management and Budget and senior White House officials. The news was later corroborated by other US media outlets.

The Fair Treatment Act was passed during the first administration of US President Donald Trump, following a 35-day shutdown that lasted from December 2018 to January 2019.

The Trump administration is now arguing that the wording of the law requires a specific action from Congress rather than an automatic payment to furloughed workers, as the shutdown is due to enter its eighth day on Wednesday.

“Does this law cover all these furloughed employees automatically? The conventional wisdom is: Yes, it does. Our view is: No, it doesn’t,” a senior White House official told Axios.

Not all Republicans agree with the White House strategy.

Louisiana Senator John Kennedy, a Republican, told CBS News that Trump alone could not determine whether federal workers are paid.

“It’s not up to the president. His opinion matters, but Congress has got to appropriate the money,” he said.

“We’ve always paid back pay to the military and federal workers, and Congress has always appropriated the money, and we will this time,” Kennedy said.

As many as 750,000 federal workers have been on furlough since the shutdown began on October 1, and their compensation amounts to approximately $400m per day, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

The Office of Personnel Management, an independent government agency, said in September that retroactive pay would be disbursed “as soon as possible” once the shutdown ends. The US government now owes employees $2.8bn, with no end in sight for the shutdown.

The threat to furloughed worker pay has been interpreted by US media as a way to force Democrats to negotiate and end the shutdown. Trump previously threatened to use the shutdown to fire federal workers, as well.

Many US parks and museums have closed their doors until the shutdown ends, while non-essential government operations are also suspended.

The impact of the shutdown is spreading beyond Washington.

The Hollywood Burbank Airport operated without air-traffic controllers on site for six hours on Monday night due to shutdown-linked staffing problems, according to a local affiliate of ABC News.

Air traffic control was operated remotely by a team from San Diego, but the airport still faced flight cancellations and delays. Other airports have reported similar problems since the shutdown began last week.

Democrats continue to block a Republican-sponsored spending bill from passing in the US Senate to force Republicans to negotiate on healthcare.

Democrats want Republicans to reverse cuts to Medicaid assistance and extend expiring healthcare subsidies. Without them, healthcare premiums will more than double in November for many Americans, according to the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, which works on healthcare policy.

The Republican bill, which extends government funding until November 21, failed to pass the Senate on Tuesday in a vote of 52-42. A Democratic version of the spending bill, which extends funding through October 31 and makes subsidies permanent, also failed in a vote of 55-45.

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s administration warned on Tuesday of no guaranteed back pay for federal workers during a government shutdown, reversing what has been long-standing policy for some 750,000 furloughed employees, according to a memo being circulated by the White House.

Trump signed into law after the longest government shutdown in 2019 legislation that ensures federal workers receive back pay during any federal funding lapse. But in the new memo, his Office of Management and Budget says back pay must be provided by Congress, if it chooses to do so, as part of any bill to fund the government.

The move by the Republican administration was widely seen as a strong-arm tactic — a way to pressure lawmakers to reopen the government, now in the seventh day of a shutdown.

“There are some people that don’t deserve to be taken care of, and we’ll take care of them in a different way,” Trump said during an event at the White House.

He said back pay “depends on who we’re talking about.”

Refusing retroactive pay to the workers, some of whom must remain on the job as essential employees, would be a stark departure from norms and practices and almost certainly would be met with legal action.

While federal workers — as well as service members of the military — have often missed paychecks during past shutdowns, they are almost always reimbursed once the government reopens.

“That should turn up the urgency and the necessity of the Democrats doing the right thing here,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said at a news conference at the Capitol.

Johnson, a lawyer, said he hadn’t fully read the memo but “there are some legal analysts who are saying” that it may not be necessary or appropriate to repay the federal workers.

But Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington blasted the Trump administration as defying the law.

“Another baseless attempt to try and scare & intimidate workers by an administration run by crooks and cowards,” said Murray, who is the ranking lawmaker on the Senate Appropriations Committee. “The letter of the law is as plain as can be — federal workers, including furloughed workers, are entitled to their back pay following a shutdown.”

Asked a second time about back pay for furloughed federal workers given that the requirement is spelled out in law, Trump said: “I follow the law, and what the law says is correct.”

In a single-page memo from Trump’s Office of Management and Budget under Russ Vought, first reported by Axios, the office’s general counsel seeks to lay out a legal rationale for no back pay of federal workers.

The memo explains that while the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019 says workers shall be paid after federal funding is restored, it argues the action is not self-executing. Instead, the memo says, repaying the federal workers would have to be part of legislation to reopen the government.

The OMB analysis draws on language familiar to budget experts by suggesting that the 2019 bill created an authorization to pay the federal workers but not the actual appropriation.

Congress, it says, is able to decide whether it wants to pay the workers or not.

For now, Congress remains at a standstill, with neither side — nor the White House — appearing willing to budge. Democrats are fighting for healthcare funds to prevent a lapse in federal subsidies that threaten to send insurance rates skyrocketing. Republicans say the issue can be dealt with later.

Mascaro writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Will Weissert, Kevin Freking, Joey Cappelletti and Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — Two hundred members of the Oregon National Guard are being placed under federal control and deployed within the state, a move the Trump administration says is needed to protect immigration enforcement officers and government facilities, according to a Defense Department memo received by state leaders on Sunday.

The deployment is being made over the objections of state leaders and is similar to one in June in Los Angeles, where protesters demonstrated against federal immigration raids, though on a much smaller scale.

There was no immediate comment from the White House. Multiple Pentagon officials were contacted, but none would confirm or deny the authenticity of the memo.

President Trump had announced Saturday that he would send troops to Portland. The state’s governor, Democrat Tina Kotek, said Sunday that she objected to the deployment in a conversation with the president.

“Oregon is our home — not a military target,” she said in a statement.

Dan Rayfield, the state attorney general, said he was filing a federal lawsuit arguing that Trump was overstepping his authority.

“What we’re seeing is not about public safety,” he said. “It’s about the president flexing political muscle under the guise of law and order, chasing a media hit at the expense of our community.”

The Pentagon memo provided by Oregon leaders drew a direct comparison between the deployment of thousands of National Guard troops to Los Angeles and the proposed deployment to the state, adding, “This memorandum further implements the President’s direction.”

While the memorandum does not specifically cite Portland as the target of the proposed deployment, Trump, in a social media post Saturday, said he directed the Pentagon, at the request of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, “to provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists.”

“I am also authorizing Full Force, if necessary,” Trump added.

Unlike in Los Angeles, it does not appear that Trump or Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are currently directing the deployment of active-duty troops to the state. The Trump administration deployed about 700 active-duty Marines to Los Angeles, who were withdrawn about a month later.

The action also would be far less than Trump’s deployment to Washington, D.C., where more than 1,000 National Guard troops, including units from other states, have patrolled the streets for weeks. He also has been suggesting that he will send troops into Chicago, but so far has not done so.

Megerian and Toropin write for the Associated Press.

At a tense political moment in the wake of conservative lightning rod Charlie Kirk’s killing, President Trump signed a presidential memorandum focusing federal law enforcement on disrupting “domestic terrorism.”

The memo appeared to focus on political violence. But during a White House signing Thursday, the president and his top advisors repeatedly hinted at a much broader campaign of suppression against the American left, referencing as problematic both the simple printing of protest signs and the prominent racial justice movement Black Lives Matter.

“We’re looking at the funders of a lot of these groups. You know, when you see the signs and they’re all beautiful signs made professionally, these aren’t your protesters that make the sign in their basement late in the evening because they really believe it. These are anarchists and agitators,” Trump said.

“Whether it be going back to the riots that started with Black Lives Matter and all the way through to the antifa riots, the attacks on ICE officers, the doxxing campaigns and now the political assassinations — these are not lone, isolated events,” said Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff. “This is part of an organized campaign of radical left terrorism.”

Neither Trump nor Miller nor the other top administration officials flanking them — including Vice President JD Vance, Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel — offered any evidence of such a widespread left-wing terror campaign, or many details about how the memo would be put into action.

Law enforcement officials have said Kirk’s alleged shooter appears to have acted alone, and data on domestic extremism more broadly — including some recently scrubbed from the Justice Department’s website — suggest right-wing extremists represent the larger threat.

Many on the right cheered Trump’s memo — just as many on the left cheered calls by Democrats for a clampdown on right-wing extremism during the Biden administration, particularly in light of the violent Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters. In that incident, more than 1,500 were criminally charged, many convicted of assaulting police officers and some for sedition, before Trump pardoned them or commuted their sentences.

Many critics of the administration slammed the memo as a “chilling” threat that called to mind some of the most notorious periods of political suppression in the nation’s history — a claim the White House dismissed as wildly off base and steeped in liberal hypocrisy.

That includes the Red Scare and the often less acknowledged Lavender Scare of the Cold War and beyond, they said, when Sen. Joseph McCarthy and other federal officials cast a pall over the nation, its social justice movements and its arts scene by promising to purge from government anyone who professed a belief in certain political ideas — such as communism — or was gay or lesbian or otherwise queer.

Douglas M. Charles, a history professor at Penn State Greater Allegheny and author of “Hoover’s War on Gays: Exposing the FBI’s ‘Sex Deviates’ Program,” said Trump’s memo strongly paralleled past government efforts at political repression — including in its claim that “extremism on migration, race and gender” and “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” are all causing violence in the country.

“What is this, McCarthyism redux?” Charles asked.

Melina Abdullah, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles, said the Trump administration is putting “targets on the backs of organizers” like her.

Abdullah, speaking Friday from Washington, D.C., where she is attending the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s annual legislative conference, said Trump’s efforts to cast left-leaning advocacy groups as a threat to democracy was “the definition of gaslighting” because the president “and his entire regime are violent.”

“They are anti-Black. They are anti-people. They are anti-free speech,” Abdullah said. “What we are is indeed an organized body of people who want freedom for our people — and that is a demand for the kind of sustainable peace that only comes with justice.”

Others, including prominent California Democrats, framed Trump’s memo and other recent administration acts — including Thursday’s indictment of former FBI Director James Comey over the objections of career prosecutors — as a worrying blueprint for much wider vengeance on Trump’s behalf, which must be resisted.

“Trump is waging a crusade of retribution — abusing the federal government as a weapon of personal revenge,” Gov. Gavin Newsom posted to X. “Today it’s his enemies. Tomorrow it may be you. Speak out. Use your voice.”

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, left, FBI Director Kash Patel and Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi listen to President Trump Thursday in the Oval Office.

(Andrew Harnik / Getty Images)

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta noted that the memo listed various incidents of violence against Republicans while “deliberately ignoring” violence against Democrats, and said that while it is unclear what may come of the order, “the chilling effect is real and cannot be ignored.”

Bonta also sent Bondi a letter Friday expressing his “grave concern” with the Comey indictment and asking her to “reassert the long-standing independence of the U.S. Department of Justice from political interference by declining to continue these politically-motivated investigations and prosecutions.”

Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said the Trump administration is twisting Kirk’s tragic killing “into a pretext to weaponize the federal government against opponents Trump says he ‘hates.’”

“In recent days, they’ve branded entire groups — including the Democratic Party itself — as threats, directed [the Justice Department] to go after his perceived enemies, and coerced companies to stifle any criticism of the Administration or its allies. This is pure personal grievance and retribution,” Padilla said. “If this abuse of power is normalized, no dissenting voice will be safe.”

Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, said it was “the highest form of hypocrisy for Democrats to falsely claim accountability is ‘political retribution’ when Joe Biden is the one who spent years weaponizing his entire Administration against President Trump and millions of patriotic Americans.”

Jackson accused the Biden administration of censoring average Americans for their posts about COVID-19 on social media and of prosecuting “peaceful pro-life protestors,” among other things, and said the Trump administration “will continue to deliver the truth to the American people, restore integrity to our justice system, and take action to stop radical left-wing violence that is plaguing American communities.”

A month ago, Miller said, “The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization” — a quote raising new concerns in light of Trump’s memo.

On Sept. 16, Bondi said on X that “the radical left” has for too long normalized threats and cheered on political violence, and that she would be ending that by somehow prosecuting them for “hate speech.”

Constitutional scholars — and some prominent conservative pundits — ridiculed Bondi’s claims as contrary to the 1st Amendment.

On Sept. 18, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein reported that unnamed national security officials had told him that the FBI was considering treating transgender suspects as a “subset” of a new threat category known as “Nihilistic Violent Extremists” — a concept LGBTQ+ organizations scrambled to denounce as a threat to everyone’s civil liberties.

“Everyone should be repulsed by the attempts to use the power of the federal government against their neighbors, their friends, and our families,” Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson said Wednesday. “It creates a dangerous precedent that could one day be used against other Americans, progressive or conservative or anywhere in between.”

In recent days, Trump has unabashedly attacked his critics — including late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, whose show was briefly suspended. On Sept. 20, he demanded on his Truth Social platform that Bondi move to prosecute several of his most prominent political opponents, including Comey, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and New York Atty. Gen. Letitia James.

“We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” wrote Trump, the only felon to ever occupy the White House. “They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”

Comey’s indictment — on charges of lying to Congress — was reported shortly after the White House event where Trump signed the memo. Trump declined to discuss Comey at the event, and was vague about who else might be targeted under the memo. But he did say he had heard “a lot of different names,” including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and George Soros, two prominent Democratic donors.

“If they are funding these things, they’re gonna have some problems,” Trump said, without providing any evidence of wrongdoing by either man.

The Open Society Foundations, which have disbursed billions from Soros’ fortune to an array of progressive groups globally, said in response that they “unequivocally condemn terrorism and do not fund terrorism” and that their activities “are peaceful and lawful.” Accusations suggesting otherwise were “politically motivated attacks on civil society, meant to silence speech the administration disagrees with,” the group said.

John Day, president-elect of the American College of Trial Lawyers, said his organization has not taken a position on Trump’s memo, but had grave concerns about the process by which Comey was indicted — namely, after Trump called for such legal action publicly.

“That, quite frankly, is very disturbing and concerning to us,” Day said. “This is not the way the legal system was designed to work, and it’s not the way it has worked for 250 years, and we are just very concerned that this happened at all,” Day said. “We’re praying that it is an outlier, as opposed to a predictor of what’s to come.”

James Kirchick, author of “Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington,” which covers the Lavender Scare and its effects on the LGBTQ+ community in detail, said the “strongest similarity” he sees between then and now is the administration “taking the actions of an individual or a small number of people” — such as Kirk’s shooter — “and extrapolating that onto an entire class of people.”

Kirchick said language on the left labeling the president a dictator isn’t helpful in such a political moment, but that he has found some of the administration’s language more alarming — especially, in light of the new memo, Miller’s suggestion that the Democratic Party is an extremist organization.

“Does that mean the Democratic Party is going to be subject to FBI raids and extremist surveillance?” he asked.

WASHINGTON — The White House is telling agencies to prepare large-scale firings of federal workers if the government shuts down next week.

In a memo released Wednesday night, the Office of Management and Budget said agencies should consider a reduction in force for federal programs whose funding would lapse next week, are not otherwise funded and are “not consistent with the President’s priorities.” That would be a much more aggressive step than in previous shutdowns, when federal workers not deemed essential were furloughed but returned to their jobs once Congress approved government spending.

A reduction in force would not only lay off employees but eliminate their positions, which would trigger yet another massive upheaval in a federal workforce that has already faced major rounds of cuts this year due to efforts from the White House’s cost-cutting team the Department of Government Efficiency, and elsewhere in the Trump administration.

Once any potential government shutdown ends, agencies are asked to revise their reduction in force plans “as needed to retain the minimal number of employees necessary to carry out statutory functions,” according to the memo, which was first reported by Politico.

This move from OMB significantly increases the consequences of a potential government shutdown next week and escalates pressure on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. The two leaders have kept nearly all of their Democratic lawmakers united against a clean funding bill pushed by President Trump and congressional Republicans that would keep the federal government operating for seven more weeks, demanding immediate improvements to healthcare in exchange for their votes.

In statements issued shortly after the memo was released, the two Democrats showed no signs of budging.

“We will not be intimidated by your threat to engage in mass firings,” Jeffries wrote in a post on X. “Get lost.”

Jeffries called Russ Vought, the head of OMB, a “malignant political hack.”

Schumer said in a statement that the OMB memo is an “attempt at intimidation” and predicted the “unnecessary firings will either be overturned in court or the administration will end up hiring the workers back.”

OMB noted that it held its first planning call with other federal agencies earlier this week to plan for a shutdown. The budget office plays point in managing federal government shutdowns, particularly planning for them ahead of time. Past budget offices have also posted shutdown contingency plans — which would outline which agency workers would stay on the job during a government shutdown and which would be furloughed — on its website, but this one has not.

The memo noted that congressional Democrats are refusing to support a clean government funding bill “due to their partisan demands,” which include an extension of enhanced health insurance subsidies set to expire at the end of the year, plus a reversal of Medicaid cuts that were included in Republicans’ big tax and spending cuts law.

“As such, it has never been more important for the Administration to be prepared for a shutdown if the Democrats choose to pursue one,” the memo reads, which also notes that the GOP’s signature law, a major tax and border spending package, gives “ample resources to ensure that many core Trump administration priorities will continue uninterrupted.”

OMB noted that it had asked all agencies to submit their plans in case of a government shutdown by Aug. 1.

“OMB has received many, but not all, of your submissions,” it added. “Please send us your updated lapse plans ASAP.”

Kim writes for the Associated Press.