Sponsors
The bill protects pay and continuity for federal employees and contractors during funding gaps, but shifts costs to taxpayers and may reduce incentives for timely appropriations while creating administrative accounting challenges.
Federal employees continue to receive regular pay and benefits during federal funding gaps, avoiding lost wages and financial hardship.
Maintains continuity of government personnel operations by allowing pay to continue without waiting for Congress to enact appropriations, reducing administrative disruption to agencies.
Government contractors who support agency employees and active-duty service members receive regular payments during shutdowns, reducing service disruptions for programs that rely on contracted support.
By reducing immediate financial pain from shutdowns, the bill could lessen political pressure on Congress to pass timely appropriations, making shutdowns more likely or longer.
Taxpayers may face increased, unplanned federal spending during funding gaps because the Treasury is authorized to provide “such sums as are necessary,” shifting costs to the public.
A retroactive effective date could create accounting and legal complexity for agencies reconciling these expenditures with enacted FY2026 appropriations, burdening payroll and contracting operations.
Based on analysis of 2 sections of legislative text.
Automatically provides Treasury funds to pay federal employees, supporting contractors, and active-duty service members standard pay and benefits during funding gaps until appropriations are enacted or expressly omitted.
Introduced October 28, 2025 by John Neely Kennedy · Last progress October 28, 2025
Automatically provides Treasury funds to keep pay and regularly scheduled benefits flowing to federal employees, contractors who support them, and active-duty service members when an agency lacks full-year appropriations or interim continuing appropriations for a fiscal year. The authority applies starting in FY2026, is retroactive to September 30, 2025, and remains available to the agency until either a law enacts appropriations for those purposes or a law is enacted that expressly provides no funds for them. The bill requires that any interim outlays under this authority be charged to the agency’s applicable appropriation once a regular or continuing appropriation becomes law, prevents use of this authority during any period when continuing appropriations for those pay purposes are already in effect, and makes the funding available only for standard pay, allowances, pay differentials, benefits, and other regularly payable payments.