With days left before a funding deadline for the U.S. government passes, Congress has yet to pass spending bills that will allow federal agencies to continue operating in October.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has yet to convince his members in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives to move forward on the appropriations bills amid a block by a far-right fringe within his caucus to advance the votes.
Hundreds of thousands of government workers across the country will be forced to stay home without pay for the duration of the shutdown if no agreement is reached by midnight on September 30.
But members of the House and Senate will continue to be paid, even as their staffers will have their salaries suspended, according to the National Constitution Center.
DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES
House members and Senators earn about $174,000 yearly. The Speaker, in his role as the top official in the House of Representatives takes home a salary of $223,500. Meanwhile, the President pro tempore of the Senate and the majority and minority leaders in both houses of Congress earn $193,400 a year.
Under the constitution’s Article 1, section 6, congress members “shall receive a Compensation for their Services, to be ascertained by Law, and paid out of the Treasury of the United States,” the National Constitution Center pointed out.
There are 435 members elected to serve in the House plus additional delegates from the District of Columbia, the Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and 100 senators sitting in the upper chamber of Congress.
This means that even as the government would cease to operate in the event of a shutdown, elected officials tasked with funding the government would receive their paychecks estimated to be more than $7.7 million, the total of their monthly earnings. It’s unclear how long the shutdown—if it happens—will last but the longest shutdown which kicked off in December 2018 went on for more than a month.
Others getting paid during a shutdown, according to the constitution, are President Joe Biden and Supreme Court Justices.
The constitution stipulates that the president’s pay, $400k annually, “shall neither be increased nor diminished during the Period for which he shall have been elected,” meaning they will receive their paycheck during a shutdown. Some staffers in the federal government, including at the White House and in Congress deemed “excepted employees” may work without pay until the federal government resumes operations.
“During a funding gap, pay for congressional employees would not be disbursed if there is no appropriation to fund legislative branch activities,” the Congressional Research Service said in its 2018 study of government shutdowns.
Some congressional staffers will have to stay home but their excepted employees colleagues who are needed “to support Congress with its constitutional responsibilities or those necessary to protect life and property” will have to show up to work but have to wait to get paid later.