The Trump administration raised the stakes on shutdown negotiations Tuesday by tossing back pay for furloughed federal workers’ on the table, according to a White House memo that argued the back pay was optional and dependent upon Congress.

The brief, first reported by Axios, originated from the Office of Management and Budget and came to light on the seventh day of the federal shutdown.

The memo picks apart a federal law, written by Democratic Maryland Sens. Chris Van Hollen and Ben Cardin and signed by Republican President Donald Trump in 2019, that mandates back pay for furloughed federal workers.

Congress, the memo says, is able to decide whether it wants to pay the workers or not as part of legislation to reopen the government.

“That’s a flat out lie,” Van Hollen said.

He called the Trump administration’s messaging part of their effort to “fear monger” and “inflict trauma on federal employees.”

So too, he said, are their threats to fire more federal workers if Democrats don’t agree to a Republican funding resolution.

Federal workers are nonpartisan civil servants who provide vital services, such as national security, food safety, air traffic control and helping people access their government benefits. Van Hollen said these threats are going to backfire on the Trump administration.

“I think people, regardless of their politics, recoil at the idea of imposing gratuitous cruelty on patriotic federal employees and imposing unnecessary hardships on the American people who will lose the benefit of their services,” he said.

The OMB memo contradicts September 2025 guidance from the Office of Personnel Management on whether furloughed federal workers will get paid, he said.

That guidance says “employees who were furloughed as the result of the lapse will receive retroactive pay for those furlough periods” and that pay should be distributed as soon as possible after reopening.

Van Hollen and Cardin championed the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019 during the country’s longest shutdown. The 35-day closure happened during Trump’s first presidency.

Congress, as a general rule, has paid back federal workers during previous shutdowns, Cardin said.

“They wanted to work. We told them they couldn’t,” he said. “So it was unfair to say that they wouldn’t get compensated for that period of time.”

The law he and Van Hollen wrote together guaranteed their back pay and he said even then he considered it a “safety valve” in case a president or Congress ever threatened to withhold it.

“The future is now,” he said.

An estimated 750,000 federal workers have been sent home or have been working without pay since Oct. 1., after Republicans and Democrats in Congress could not agree on how to fund government operations.

Nearly 162,000 federal civilian jobs are located in Maryland and an estimated 269,000 Marylanders are federal workers, with many commuting to jobs in Virginia or the District of Columbia, according to state data.

Maryland has lost more than 15,000 federal jobs since the start of the second Trump administration.

Senators have continued to vote on Republican and Democratic proposals almost every day since the government closed, but have seen little variation in end results. Meanwhile, the leaders of both parties have tried to wrangle public opinion.

The House of Representative is scheduled to return on Monday.

Trump said Tuesday that back pay “depends on who you’re talking about.”

”But for the most part, we’re going to take care of our people,” Trump said. “There are some people that really don’t deserve to be taken care of and we’ll take care of them in a different way.”

The Associated Press contributed to this article.