High-ranking members of the Trump administration — including Vice President Mike Pence — are set to receive annual pay raises of about $10,000 this week while hundreds of thousands of federal employees remain without pay because of the government shutdown, a report says.
The raises had been blocked by a cap on federal executive pay enacted by Congress in 2013 and renewed each subsequent year, according to The Washington Post.
When Congress failed to fund the government on Dec. 21, however, kicking off the partial government shutdown, they also failed to renew the pay freeze holding back the raises, the Post said Friday.
Meanwhile, roughly 800,000 federal employees are currently without pay due to the shutdown. Some have been furloughed, with many others are working without pay.
“The optics of this are not pretty,” Jeffrey Neal, a former personnel executive at the Department of Homeland Security, told the Post.
If Congress does not take action by Jan. 5, hundreds of senior officials including Cabinet secretaries, deputy secretaries, top administrators will receive the unpaid raises that have accumulated over the past five years.
Each raise needs to be processed by that employee’s specific human resources department, however. With some agencies unstaffed during the partial government shutdown, some executives will earn larger wages right away while others will have to wait for the government to reopen.