President Donald Trump issued an executive order Dec. 28 formalizing the 2019 federal employee pay freeze that he announced his intent to enact four months earlier.
Employee organizations decried the freeze as adding insult to injury during a partial government shutdownthat has kept hundreds of thousands of feds out of work for over a week.
“This is just pouring salt into the wound,” Tony Reardon, National Treasury Employees Union national president, said in a statement. “It is shocking that federal employees are taking yet another financial hit. As if missed paychecks and working without pay were not enough, now they have been told that they don’t even deserve a modest pay increase.”