Senior officials to receive a raise

Hundreds of Trump appointees set to get annual raises as many go without pay during the partial shutdown.

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 Vice President Mike Pence are scheduled to go into effect beginning Saturday 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 unintended 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.

The pay freeze for top federal executives was enacted by Congress in 2013 and renewed each year since then. The raises will occur because that cap will expire Saturday without legislative action, allowing raises to kick in that have accumulated over those years but never took effect.

The raises start with paychecks to be issued next week. Cabinet secretaries 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.

The pay of Pence is scheduled to rise from $230,700 to $243,500. He told reporters on Friday afternoon that he would turn down the raise.

It was unclear whether the White House had the authority to stop the increases. President Donald Trump was asked by a reporter Friday whether he would consider halting the raises, or halting them during the shutdown.

“I might consider that,” Trump said. “That’s a very good question.”

Later Friday, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said the pending pay raise “is another unnecessary byproduct of the shutdown.

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 the 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.

An administration official said that Pence’s staff believes he has to accept the raise during the shutdown and pay taxes on it, but will reimburse the Treasury or donate the pay to charity.

Some 800,000 federal employees are in unpaid status because of the partial government shutdown.