The Supreme Court ruled 5–4 on April 30 that federal employees who also serve as military reservists have to receive pay equivalent to their civilian salaries when they serve on active duty during national emergencies.
The ruling may have an impact on tens of thousands of government employees or more.
Justice Clarence Thomas filed a dissenting opinion, which was joined by Justices Samuel Alito, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Air traffic controller Nick Feliciano argued that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which is part of the Department of Transportation, should have provided him full pay after his two years of involuntary work as a reservist for the U.S. Coast Guard was completed in 2014.
Reservists’ pay is often lower than the pay they receive for their federal civilian jobs.
To make sure reservists do not suffer a financial disadvantage for their active-duty service, a differential pay statute states that the government must pay them their salary for the federal civilian job during reserve service.
For the two years after he was called up in 2012, Feliciano’s pay was topped up under the differential pay law. In 2014, Feliciano extended his work as a reservist until 2017, but for those three years, he received only reservist-level pay, according to court papers.
Feliciano argued he should have received the higher pay for the three years because the Reservists Pay Security Act requires it when a reservist has to go on duty “during a national emergency declared by the President or Congress.”
Feliciano argued he should receive the higher pay because he served during the national emergency that was declared at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
In its new ruling, the Supreme Court found that the pay of reservists called to active duty during an emergency should be equal to the pay they would have received from their federal civilian jobs.
“A federal civilian employee called to active duty pursuant to ‘any other provision of law ... during a national emergency’ is entitled to differential pay without having to prove that his service was substantively connected in some particular way to some particular emergency,” Gorsuch wrote.
In his dissent, Thomas wrote that the court was called upon to decide the meaning of the phrase “during a national emergency.”
“Depending on the context, that phrase could require only that a national emergency be concurrently ongoing, or it could require that a reservist’s service also be in support of a particular national emergency. Given the context here, I would conclude that a reservist is called to serve ‘during a national emergency’ only if his call comes in the course of an operation responding to a national emergency,” Thomas wrote.
