Pence, other Cabinet members' pay raises frozen amid shutdown

Jan. 5 (UPI) -- The Office of Personnel Management announced it is freezing planned pay raises for Vice President Mike Pence and other senior administration officials due to the partial government shutdown.

Margaret Weichert, the acting director of the OPM, issued a memo Friday evening announcing the pay freeze.

OPM "believes it would be prudent for agencies to continue to pay these senior political officials at the frozen rate until appropriations legislation is enacted that would clarify the status of the freeze," she wrote.

Pence's salary was expected to increase from $230,700 to $243,500 Saturday, but after a Friday afternoon news conference by President Donald Trump on the shutdown, the vice president told reporters he would not take the raise.

In addition to Pence, Cabinet secretaries, deputy secretaries and ambassadors were expected to see pay raises.

The move comes a week after Trump signed an executive order freezing non-military federal workers' 2019 pay. Federal workers were expecting to receive a 2.1 percent across-the-board pay raise this year.

The order is expected to affect around 2 million civilian federal workers.

The partial government shutdown entered its 14th day Saturday. The impasse centers around more than $5 billion Trump wants to fund a physical wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. The House and Senate passed a new stopgap funding bill without the funding he sought by Dec. 21, but the president refused to sign the legislation.

The newly Democrat-controlled House is refusing to add the funding into its legislation.

The shutdown has left 800,000 federal employees on furlough or working without pay.

Trump met twice with Democratic leadership at the White House this week, but the two sides failed to reach an agreement to reopen the government. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York said the president told them Friday he's prepared for the shutdown to last months or years.

Trump planned to meet with congressional leaders at 11 a.m. Saturday for more negotiations.

"The Democrats could solve the Shutdown problem in a very short period of time. All they have to do is approve REAL Border Security (including a Wall), something which everyone, other than drug dealers, human traffickers and criminals, want very badly! This would be so easy to do!" the president tweeted early Saturday morning.