The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that federal employees who serve in the U.S. military as reservists are entitled to receive the equivalent of their civil pay when serving on active duty in a national emergency.
In a 5-4 decision, the justices said Nick Feliciano, a Coast Guard petty officer who was called to active duty from 2012 to 2017, should have been paid the difference between his Coast Guard salary and his pay as an air traffic controller at the Federal Aviation Administration.
Congress created the "differential pay statute" in 2009, requiring that the federal government pay reserve members their full salaries when called up in support of a declared national emergency.
Government attorneys argued Feliciano didn't qualify for the differential, because although he was called up as a result of the operational needs during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, his Coast Guard job escorting ships to and from harbor in Charleston, South Carolina, didn't count.
But in a majority opinion published Wednesday by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the Supreme Court said the law covered any federal civilian employee called up during a national emergency.
"Requiring a substantive connection would create interpretive difficulties, as the statute provides no principled way to determine what kind of substantive connection would suffice," Gorsuch wrote.
Roughly 1.2 million Americans serve as reserve members, and thousands of those work for the federal government. Brian Lawler, Feliciano's attorney and a former Marine Corps aviator who specializes in pilot and service employment law, said the ruling has the potential to affect "thousands, perhaps tens of thousands" of people.
"This is what we had hoped for ... in which the court held [that the plaintiffs] don't have to show any connection to any particular emergency," Lawler said during an interview with Military.com on Thursday.
Lawler added he has several cases that were placed on hold, pending the Supreme Court decision, and he expects there are others that will be reactivated or initiated as a result of the ruling.
Under the ruling, Feliciano's case will return to the Merit Systems Protection Board -- the body to which he filed his petition for pay in 2018.
Joining Gorsuch in the majority were Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the dissent, arguing the ruling was too broad and the differential pay statute should only be applied to those called up "in the course of an operation responding to 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 ... Because the court requires only that an emergency be concurrently ongoing, I respectfully dissent," Thomas wrote.
He added he would have remanded the case to the lower court. Justices Samuel Alito, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson agreed, voting with the dissent.
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