Maritime Enforcement Specialist 2nd Class Frank Polinik, a reservist from Coast Guard Station Washington, participates in a marine safety patrol on the Potomac River outside Washington, D.C., Nov. 17, 2018. Reservists serve as a force multiplier in the Coast Guard’s efforts to protect our Nation’s Capital. (Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Charlotte Fritts.) Image: USCG
By: FEDweek StaffFederal employees who are called to active military duty as National Guard or Reserve members are eligible for differential that brings their often much lower military pay up to the level of their federal pay, even “without any showing that the service bears a substantive connection to a particular emergency,” the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled.
At issue in case No. 23-861 was the meaning of a law conferring eligibility for what is called reservist differential pay for service “pursuant to a call or order to active duty” under a provision of law that in turn lists several authorities. Among them is a catchall provision for “any other provision of law during a war or during a national emergency declared by the President or Congress.”
The appeal came from federal circuit court holding that the differential applies only for duties in direct support of a specific national emergency. The Justice Department in briefings and oral arguments last year had asked the high court to uphold that decision and rule that the differential does not apply while an “unrelated emergency declaration is in effect.”
The employee, an air traffic controller who had been called to active duty as a Coast Guard reservist, argued that the law contains no such requirement and that imposing one would discourage federal employees from participating in the Guard or Reserves.
In a 5-4 ruling with a mix of more conservative and more liberal justices on both sides, the high court, the majority agreed with the employee. It said that “the absence of any words hinting at a substantive connection in the statute at issue here supplies a telling clue that it operates differently and imposes a temporal condition alone.”
“Moreover, requiring a substantive connection would create interpretive difficulties, as the statute provides no principled way to determine what kind of substantive connection would suffice,” it said.
The dissenting justices wrote that while the law itself can be interpreted in different ways, the context indicates that the differential applies only to those “called to serve in an operation responding to a national emergency. Reservists cannot benefit if they are called to serve merely while other, unrelated emergency responses are ongoing.”
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