The State Department is telling some employees targeted by mass layoffs this summer that their official separation date is imminent — and is not affected by a shutdown-ending spending deal that forced some agencies to rescind layoff notices.

The department’s human resources office, in a notice sent Monday evening, said Foreign Service employees who received reduction-in-force notices on July 11 will be officially separated from the agency this Friday, Dec. 5.

According to the Bureau of Global Talent Management, State Department attorneys determined that a recent stopgap spending bill passed by Congress, which ended the longest government shutdown, does not require the agency to rescind any RIF notices that were sent before the shutdown.

“Following formal written guidance from both the Office of Management and Budget and Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel, the Department of State’s Office of the Legal Adviser has determined that completing the reductions in force (RIFs) noticed prior to the lapse in appropriations does not violate the Antideficiency Act (ADA) or any other restriction within HR 5371,” the memo obtained by Federal News Network states. “Given this determination, the Department will finalize your separation or involuntary retirement on Friday, December 5.”

The department, as part of this update, has modified the official separation date for impacted employees.

Foreign Service employees were originally told they would be separated from the agency on Nov. 10,  when the agency was still affected by the government shutdown. Those employees will now be separated from the State Department on Dec. 5

In a separate notice, Global Talent Management said the State Department is extending administrative leave for all Foreign Service employees who were scheduled for separation as part of the RIF.

“We are reviewing the administrative errors in all SF-50s issued on Friday, November 7, to ensure that all information is accurate,” the notice states, referring to a federal employee’s official employment record.

It’s not clear what administrative errors the department intends to correct. An employee’s SF-50 form shared with Federal News Network shows that Lew Olowski, the department’s top HR official, approved the RIFs to go into effect on Nov. 10.

A State Department spokesperson told Federal News Network that, “since the State Department’s lawful reduction in force (RIF) process was commenced and initiated well before the lapse in appropriations, the eliminated positions are not impacted by the language in the recent continuing resolution.”

“Legal opinions published by both OMB and DOJ confirm that outcome,” the spokesperson said. “The State Department will proceed with executing the RIF process as planned.”

A Foreign Service officer who received a RIF notice told Federal News Network that the State Department “can’t just extend admin leave” to set a new separation date.

The Foreign Service officer, who requested anonymity because they were not cleared to speak to the media, said moving the original Nov. 10 separation date amounts to a “de facto reinstatement,” and that the department would need to issue entirely new RIF notices and provide at least a 60-day notice for that new separation date.

“This entire action just seems patently unlawful, and I do not understand how the department plans to get away with it,” the Foreign Service officer said.

By law, each federal employee subject to a RIF “is entitled to a specific written notice at least 60 full days before the effective date of release.”

According to the SF-50 notice, employees eligible for severance will receive a lump-sum payment on Jan. 1, 2026.

The State Department laid off more than 1,300 employees on July 11. It sent RIF notices to more than 1,100 civil service employees and nearly 250 Foreign Service employees who were based in the United States at the time.

Senior department officials later told Congress that the RIF was the largest and most complex workforce reduction of its kind, and that they carried out the layoffs in consultation with the Office of Personnel Management.

Questions about the possibility of reinstatement primarily focused on laid-off Foreign Service officers, who had been on administrative leave for a longer period than their civil service counterparts.

Foreign Service employees who received RIF notices were scheduled to be officially 120 days out from their RIF notices. But civil service employees who received RIF notices had only 60 days before their official separation.  They left the department in early September.

The State Department and several other agencies have rejected calls from laid-off employees, unions and Democratic lawmakers who say more federal employees are eligible for reinstatement than what the Trump administration has allowed.

The American Foreign Service Association said last month that its interpretation of the continuing resolution passed by Congress on Nov. 12 blocks the State Department from moving forward with its layoff notices.

The continuing resolution Congress passed on Nov. 12 states that “any reduction in force proposed, noticed, initiated, executed, implemented, or otherwise taken by an Executive Agency between October 1, 2025, and the date of enactment, shall have no force or effect.”

“We understand that Congress intended for this language to apply to as many federal employees as possible, including those who received layoff notices from the State Department on July 11,” AFSA wrote.

On Tuesday, AFSA said it is working closely with the American Federation of Government Employees and will be pursuing legal action.

“This action flies in the face of the current funding law, which clearly prohibits using any federal resources to carry out layoffs during this period,” AFSA said in a statement. “That includes sending notices, processing paperwork, or taking any step to advance these separations.”

Democratic lawmakers say agencies aren’t reinstating as many federal employees as they should be under the spending deal.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) is leading the push for more RIF rescissions, along with several of his Democratic colleagues.

Kaine was one of eight Democratic senators who broke ranks to pass the stopgap spending bill, only after Republicans agreed to include language that would protect federal employees from layoffs at least through Jan. 30, 2026. Kaine and his colleagues backed standalone legislation during the shutdown that would have also barred the Trump administration from moving ahead with its most recent wave of mass layoffs.

Kaine, along with Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Jack Reed (D-R.I.), and Patty Murray (D-Wash.), said the continuing resolution — particularly Section 120 of the stopgap bill — placed a moratorium on RIFs involving federal employees, and that the “moratorium is broad, clear and unequivocal.”

Agencies, however, have followed a narrower interpretation, and have only reinstated federal employees who received RIF notices between Oct 1 and Nov. 12. Agencies told a federal court that they rescinded shutdown-era RIF notices for more than 3,600 employees.

Federal News Network first reported that the Small Business Administration told 77 recently laid-off employees this week that they could get their jobs back, but rescinded that offer a day later.

An SBA spokesperson said in a statement that the agency “has determined that the most recent continuing resolution signed into law does not apply to any RIFs executed by the SBA.”

The Democratic senators told SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler that the agency is “unlawfully pursuing reductions in force,” and that dozens of recently laid-off employees the agency hasn’t reinstated “have a right to continue their employment.”

A group of 35 former General Services Administration employees also called on the agency to rescind their RIF notices, on the grounds that Congress intended to reinstate them.

GSA’s Associate General Counsel Daniel Hall told their attorneys in a Nov. 24 letter that the RIF notices “were issued before and separate from the lapse in appropriations occurring on October 1, 2025, and are outside of the intended scope of the Act and its provisions on RIFs.”

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The IRS, ahead of an upcoming reorganization of its tech office, is putting its IT staff to the test.

The agency, in an email sent Monday, directed its IT workforce to complete a “technical skills assessment.”

IRS Chief Information Officer Kaschit Pandya told employees that the assessment is part of a broader effort to gauge the team’s technical proficiency, ahead of an “IRS IT organizational realignment.”

“Over time, hiring practices and role assignments have evolved, and we want to ensure our technical workforce is accurately aligned with the work ahead. The assessment will help establish a baseline understanding of our collective strengths and areas for development,” Pandya told staff in an email sent Monday.

Pandya’s office is leading the technical skills assessment, in coordination with the Treasury Department, the IRS human capital office and the Office of Personnel Management.

“I want to emphasize that this is a baseline assessment, not a performance rating. Your individual-level results will not affect your pay or grade,” he told staff. “I know this comes during a very busy and uncertain time, and I deeply appreciate your partnership.”

Pandya told staff that a “limited group” of IRS IT employees in technical roles — including developers, testers and artificial intelligence/machine learning engineers have been invited to complete the test. He told staff that, as of Monday, about 100 employees were directed to complete the assessment.

On Friday, an IRS IT employee told Federal News Network that several hundred employees have now completed the assessment, and that it took employees about 90 minutes to complete it.

According to the employee, Pandya told staff in an all-hands meeting on Friday that one of the agency’s goals is to rely more on full-time IT employees, and less on outside contractors. He said during that meeting that IRS IT currently has about 6,000 IT employees and about 4,500 contractors.

“It doesn’t make sense, considering all the RIFs, firings and decisions that ignored expertise,” the IRS IT employee said.

The IRS has lost more than 25% of its workforce so far this year, largely through voluntary separation incentives. Pandya told staff in an email this summer that the agency needs to “reset and reassess,” in part because more than 2,000 IT employees have separated from the IRS since January. The IRS had about 8,500 IT employees at the start of fiscal 2025.

The agency also sent mass layoff notices to its employees during the government shutdown, but has rescinded those notices as required by Congress in its spending deal that ended the shutdown.

The Treasury Department sent reduction-in-force notices to 1,377 employees during the recent government shutdown — as part of a broader RIF that targeted about 4,000 federal workers. Court documents show the IRS employees received the vast majority of those RIF notices, and that they disproportionately impacted human resources and IT personnel at the IRS.

The technical assessment is also in line with goals set by Treasury CIO and Department of Government Efficiency representative Sam Corcos, who recently said IRS IT layoffs were “painful,” but necessary for the agency’s upcoming tech reorganization.

In a recent podcast interview, Corcos said much of his time as Treasury CIO has been focused on projects at the IRS, and that the agency’s IT workforce doesn’t have the necessary skills to deliver on its long-term modernization goals.

“We’re in the process of recomposing the engineering org in the IRS, which is we have too many people within the engineering function who are not engineers,” he said. “The goal is, let’s find who our engineers are. Let’s move the people who are not into some other function, and then we’re going to bring in more engineers.”

Corcos estimated that there are about 100 to 200 IRS IT employees currently at the organization that he trusts to carry out his reorganization plans.

“When you go in and you talk to people, a lot of the people, especially an engineer, the engineers on the team, they want to solve this problem. They don’t feel good about the fact that this thing has been ongoing for 35 years and will probably never get done. They actually want to solve these problems.”

IT employees at several agencies have gone through evaluations and assessments during the Trump administration. Tech employees at the General Services Administration were also interviewed and questioned about their skills and expertise by GSA and DOGE leadership. GSA later downsized its Technology Transformation Services office and shuttered its 18F tech shop.

In March, the IRS removed 50 of its IT leaders from their jobs and put them on paid administrative leave. Corcos defended that decision, saying the IRS “has had poor technical leadership for roughly 40 years.”

Corcos said those former IRS IT leaders pushed back on DOGE’s audit of government contracts. The agency, he added, spent an “astounding” amount on cybersecurity contracts, but former leaders resisted cutting and scaling back any of those contracts.

“The initial leadership team just said, ‘Everything is critical, you can’t cut anything. In fact, we need more,’” Corcos said. “And when we swapped them out for people who were more in the weeds, who knew what these things were, we found actually quite a lot that we could cut.”

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Following the longest shutdown in U.S. history, the federal workforce is now trying to get back to at least some sense of normalcy.

While federal employees who have been furloughed for the last 43 days return to work Thursday, the Office of Personnel Management is setting expectations for agencies as they begin to update pay, leave and benefits for those impacted by the lapse in appropriations.

In new guidance, OPM said it is “is committed to ensuring that retroactive pay is provided as soon as possible.” Compensation will be provided for both furloughed and excepted federal employees, as the spending agreement that was enacted Wednesday evening reaffirmed. A 2019 law previously called for retroactive compensation for all federal employees impacted by a shutdown.

A senior Trump administration official said the White House “has urged agencies to get employee paychecks out expeditiously and accurately to not leave anyone waiting longer than necessary.”

But the timing of employees receiving their back pay varies, depending on what payroll provider an agency uses, and the different pay schedules across the federal workforce.

Sending out retroactive payments to employees involves working across agency HR offices, federal payroll providers and shared service centers. Agency HR offices, for instance, have to submit timecards for federal employees, which are then processed by the government’s various payroll providers.

According to the senior administration official, employees from the General Services Administration and OPM will be among the first to receive their retroactive paychecks, with an expected deposit date set for Saturday.

Employees at the departments of Veterans Affairs, Energy, and Health and Human Services, as well as civilian employees from the Defense Department, will receive their deposits shortly after that — this Sunday.

On Monday, affected employees from the departments of Education, State, Interior and Transportation, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency, National Science Foundation, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Social Security Administration and NASA, are all expected to receive their back pay.

Then on Wednesday, employees from the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Treasury, Labor and Justice, along with the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Small Business Administration, are projected to get their paychecks. The timing of the retroactive payments for feds was first reported by Semafor.

The National Finance Center, a payroll provider housed under the Agriculture Department, confirmed that employees at agencies using NFC’s services should expect a payroll deposit by the middle of next week.

“In order to provide backpay for employees as quickly as possible, the National Finance Center will be expediting pay processing for pay period 22 and backpay for pay periods 19 (October 1-4), 20 (October 5-18), and 21 (October 19-November 1),” USDA wrote in an all-staff email Wednesday evening, obtained by Federal News Network.

Federal News Network has reached out to several other federal payroll providers requesting details on the timeline for processing retroactive payments.

The National Treasury Employees Union urged immediate back pay for all federal employees who have been going without compensation for the last six weeks.

“This is an emergency for federal employees across the country, and they should not have to wait another minute longer for the paychecks they lost during the longest government shutdown in history,” NTEU National President Doreen Greenwald said. “We call on all federal agencies to process the back pay immediately.”

In its new guidance, OPM also noted that to make payments as quickly as possible, payroll providers may need to “make some adjustments.” That could mean, for instance, that the initial retroactive payments employees receive might not reflect the exact calculations of their pay and leave hours.

“Payroll providers will work with agencies to make any necessary adjustments as soon as practicable,” OPM said.

Who receives back pay, and how much?

Furloughed employees will receive their “standard rate of pay” for the hours they would have worked if the government shutdown hadn’t occurred, OPM said in its guidance Wednesday evening.

But there are some exceptions to that. If a furloughed employee, for example, had been scheduled for overtime hours that would have occurred during the shutdown, OPM said they should be paid their premium rate for those hours.

Additionally, OPM said that allowances, differentials and other types of payments, like administratively uncontrollable overtime pay or law enforcement availability pay, should be paid as if the furloughed employee continued to work.

Although most employees impacted by the shutdown are ensured back pay, there are some smaller exceptions carved out where employees may not receive retroactive pay, OPM added.

If a furloughed employee was in a non-pay status before the shutdown began, for instance, then they are not entitled to receive back pay.

Excepted employees who were considered “absent without leave” (AWOL) — or in other words, took unapproved time off — will also not receive back pay for that time.

Guidance on leave, post-shutdown

Although excepted employees are not required to use paid leave for taking time off during the shutdown — and can instead enter a “furlough” period — there may still have been some instances where excepted employees took leave during the funding lapse, OPM wrote in its guidance.

In those cases, excepted employees who were approved to take paid leave during the shutdown will be charged for the hours from their leave bank, OPM said.

Agencies are also expected to begin adjusting leave accrual for furloughed employees. Now that the shutdown is over, furloughed employees should be placed in a “pay status” for the time they would have otherwise spent working during the funding lapse. That means accrual of annual and sick leave will be retroactively adjusted as if the employees were in a pay status, OPM said.

Excepted employees continued to accrue leave during the shutdown, which should be reflected in their leave banks, OPM said.

What happens to RIFs of federal employees?

On top of reaffirming back pay, the spending bill that was enacted Wednesday evening also rescinds the roughly 4,000 reductions in force that have occurred since Oct. 1. Federal employees will be temporarily protected from additional RIFs, at least until the end of January.

Agencies have five days to inform federal employees who received RIF notices in October that those actions are rescinded.

“Agencies should issue those notices and confirm to OPM the rescissions have been issued,” OPM’s guidance states.

At least 670,000 federal employees have been furloughed, and 730,000 employees have been working without pay during the shutdown. Agencies have been putting plans in the works to return all furloughed federal employees to their duties as of Thursday.

OPM also said agencies “may consider” providing flexibility for employees who might not be able to return to work immediately, such as by approving personal leave or adjusting individual work schedules.

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The Senate’s initial agreement toward ending the longest-ever government shutdown includes provisions that would secure back pay for all federal employees, as well as reverse the Trump administration’s recent reductions in force.

Though much is still up in the air and subject to possible changes, the early steps in the process indicate that, if the Senate bill’s current language is maintained, both excepted and furloughed federal employees would receive back pay dating to Oct. 1, the day the shutdown began.

Federal employees, regardless of whether they are furloughed or excepted, have always received back pay following every past shutdown, due to one-time actions from Congress. It wasn’t until 2019 that Congress passed — and President Donald Trump signed — a law meant to ensure federal employees are compensated retroactively for all shutdowns going forward.

Questions over back pay arose once again, however, after the Office of Management and Budget released a draft legal opinion in October, suggesting that furloughed employees are not automatically ensured back pay after all.

Many lawmakers, attorneys and unions harshly criticized the White House’s opinion, calling it a clear misinterpretation of the 2019 Government Employees Fair Treatment Act.

Throughout the funding lapse, the Trump administration has shuffled funding to compensate select groups of the federal workforce, as well as military members, while hundreds of thousands of others have missed two paychecks since the shutdown began.

The Senate took the first step toward ending the shutdown on Sunday, clearing a procedural hurdle that required 60 votes to move the spending legislation forward in the appropriations process. All but eight Democrats voted against the spending measure. But an actual end to the shutdown may still be at least several days away.

The current agreement includes bipartisan bills worked out by the Senate Appropriations Committee to fund parts of government, including food aid, veterans’ programs and the legislative branch. A continuing resolution would fund most other agency appropriations until the end of January, giving lawmakers more than two months to finish the additional spending bills.

The Senate’s legislation over the weekend would also compel agencies to reverse all reduction-in-force actions that have taken place since the shutdown began. About 4,200 federal employees across government received RIF notices in mid-October, following guidance from the White House that encouraged agencies to move forward with layoffs in the event of a funding lapse.

Most, but not all, of those RIF actions are currently on hold due to a preliminary injunction granted by a district court judge last month. Federal unions are suing the Trump administration over the layoffs, alleging that they violate the Administrative Procedure Act.

The Senate’s tentative agreement would also temporarily bar the Trump administration from conducting further RIFs until late January.

Federal employee organizations and unions expressed strong support for the provisions to secure back pay for federal employees and protect against RIFs.

“These protections provide for fundamental fairness,” Marcus Hill, president of the Senior Executives Association, said Monday. “They also safeguard continuity of government operations, preserve critical talent, and stabilize and extend funding for missions and services that millions of Americans rely on daily.”

“Millions of federal employees have missed paychecks, forcing them to assume significant financial cost, risk and uncertainty,” William Shackelford, national president of the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association (NARFE), said. “Government shutdowns — partial as they are — harm dedicated public servants and the missions and people they serve.”

The American Federation of Government Employees threw in additional support for the passage of the Shutdown Fairness Act, a Republican-led bill to pay federal employees immediately during the current government shutdown, as well as any future ones.

“While we are glad that the shutdown is coming to an end for now, we remain concerned about the growing use of government shutdowns as leverage for political gain,” AFGE National President Everett Kelley said. “That’s why AFGE strongly supports the bipartisan Shutdown Fairness Act, which would pay federal workers during government shutdowns, ensuring that federal employees will never be used as political pawns again.”

The Shutdown Fairness Act failed to advance in the Senate on Friday. Democrats largely voted down the legislation on the grounds that it did not include guardrails to prevent the Trump administration from paying some federal employees and not others.

After the bill initially failed to move forward two weeks ago, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) expanded his legislation to include furloughed employees and federal contractors. The bill initially only provided immediate pay for excepted employees who continue to work during a shutdown.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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