Speaker of the United States House of Representatives Mike Johnson, R-La., conducts a press conference in the US Capitol Tuesday, October 28, 2025. Speaker Johnson is marking the 28th day of the US Government shutdown . Image: Pool/ABACA/Shutterstock
By: FEDweek StaffThere have been suggestions of a possible compromise—but no definite signs of one yet—on legislation to pay at least some federal employees who have been in unpaid status since October 1.
Attention is focused on the Senate, which last week called up a bill (S-3012) to provide back pay and continuing pay for the roughly 1 million employees who have been working, although unpaid, due to the nature of their jobs. On what amounted to a test vote last week, that bill fell six votes short of the 60 needed to assure passage there.
That was due to the opposition of most Senate Democrats, who pointed out that the measure would not benefit some 600,000 employees who are on unpaid furloughs (the balance of the federal workforce remains in paid status due to prefunding or reprogramming of funds). Democrats offered instead an alternative bill (S-3039) that would include them, as well as military servicemembers and contractor employees.
That bill further would prohibit a shutdown from being used as a justification to conduct reductions in force—which the Trump administration has done by ordering layoffs of more than 4,000 federal employees in various agencies, although blocked at least for now by a court order. “We do want to pay all federal employees because none of them should be punished, but we also don’t want them to be fired and RIF’d during this period of time,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., the main sponsor of that bill.
Republicans in turn prevented it from reaching even a preliminary vote. However, the main sponsor of the GOP bill, Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, said that “there are a lot of areas of agreement” between the bills and indicated being receptive to the Democratic-backed language to include furloughed employees.
“When all this is said and done, when we finally end this dysfunction, we fund the government through an appropriation, and because of the 2019 Government Fair Treatment Act, they will get paid anyway,” he said.
That is a notable difference from the White House position that the 2019 law does not necessarily guarantee back pay to furloughed employees, even though that was the intent of that law.
Regarding the RIF language, though, he said “I don’t think we should limit the president’s ability, the chief executive’s ability, to properly manage the federal government and make the tough decisions, sometimes, to reduce the workforce, cut out some government functions.”
However, even there he said “that is something we can talk about.”
While behind the scenes discussions reportedly are occurring, no revised version of the bill has emerged and the Senate has not yet scheduled a vote on any such bill this week.
Even Senate passage this week would not provide immediate relief, though, since the bill would then go to the House. That chamber has been out of session since late September when it passed a Republican-sponsored temporary funding extension, as a means of pressuring the Senate to accept that bill rather than a Democratic-sponsored alternative.
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