I. The Statute

There are eleven legal public holidays in the United States. Not ten, not twelve. The complete universe of federal holidays is set out in a single statute, 5 U.S.C. § 6103(a), which lists them by name: New Year’s Day, the Birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., Washington’s Birthday, Memorial Day, Juneteenth National Independence Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Columbus Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving Day, and Christmas Day.¹ The placement of the statute is instructive. It sits in Title 5, which governs federal government organization and employees. Federal holidays are, at their core, a federal workforce scheduling instrument. They dictate when federal offices close, when federal employees are excused from duty with pay, and when the machinery of government pauses.²

The statute is specific. “Columbus Day, the second Monday in October.” The Office of Personnel Management maintains the list on its public fact sheet and confirms the operational consequences: federal offices close, federal employees receive a paid day off, and the United States Postal Service suspends mail delivery.³ The point is that Congress has decreed that the second Monday in October is a day of national commemoration, that the commemoration is of Christopher Columbus, and that the commemoration shall be observed by means of the entire federal workforce not working, at full pay.

Section 6103(b) provides the pay mechanism. It states that for purposes of statutes relating to pay and leave of employees, “with respect to a legal public holiday and any other day declared to be a holiday by Federal statute or Executive order,” certain substitution rules apply when the holiday falls on a non-workday.⁴ The provision assumes that a legal public holiday is, in fact, a holiday. A holiday is a day set apart for commemoration. A commemoration is a statement that something happened. This investigation examined what happened. Nothing happened. At least, nothing happened in the place Congress is honoring.

One further statutory observation, which will matter later. The words “Indigenous Peoples’ Day” do not appear in 5 U.S.C. § 6103. They do not appear anywhere in Title 5. A presidential proclamation cannot insert them. Only Congress can add a legal public holiday to § 6103(a), as it did for Juneteenth in 2021 by statute.⁵ The President can, however, declare a holiday for federal employees by executive order under § 6103(b), the instrument behind the familiar Christmas Eve closures. Biden chose a proclamation, not an order, which is why no leave followed. As of 2026, no federal legislation to add Indigenous Peoples’ Day to the statute or to remove Columbus Day from it has advanced. The federal government therefore observes Columbus Day by law. The distinction is not rhetorical. It is recorded in the payroll system, as will be shown.

II. The Legislative History

The commemoration began, as American commemorations often do, before the thing being commemorated was properly understood. The first celebration of Columbus’s landing took place in New York City in 1792, on the 300th anniversary, organized by the Society of St. Tammany, also known as the Columbian Order.⁶ In 1892, President Benjamin Harrison issued a proclamation for the 400th anniversary, urging Americans to commemorate “the discovery of America,” and the Pledge of Allegiance was recited publicly for the first time during the celebrations.⁷ The claim embedded in the 1892 proclamation, that America had been discovered, would have surprised the people who were already living in it.

Colorado became the first state to declare Columbus Day a legal holiday on April 7, 1907.⁸ In 1934, Congress requested that the President proclaim October 12 as Columbus Day annually, and in 1937 President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued the first federal observance.⁹ In 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, Public Law 90-363, moving several federal holidays, including Columbus Day, to designated Mondays; the Monday schedule took effect in 1971.¹⁰ Columbus Day has therefore been a paid federal holiday, observed on the second Monday in October, continuously since 1971. That is 56 observances, including today.

Note the precision with which Congress calibrated the commemoration. The holiday was moved off October 12, the actual anniversary of the landing, so that the commemoration could produce a three-day weekend. The legislative history of the Uniform Monday Holiday Act is explicit about the purpose: long weekends. Congress used the full power of federal personnel law to reposition a national commemoration by up to four days for the convenience of the calendar. It did not, at any point in the 234 years since that first celebration, verify that the thing being commemorated had occurred in the country doing the commemorating.

This year, by the accident of the calendar, the second Monday of October falls on October 12 itself. The commemoration, for the first time in years, coincides with the actual anniversary of the landing. The landing was in the Bahamas.

III. The Itinerary

Christopher Columbus made four voyages to the New World between 1492 and 1504. On October 12, 1492, he landed on the island of Guanahani in the Bahamas, with a crew of about 90 men aboard the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María.¹¹ That is the landing the holiday marks. Guanahani is in the Bahamas. The Bahamas are not the United States. Columbus then proceeded to Cuba and Hispaniola. On his later voyages he explored the coasts of Central America and South America.¹² He did not reach the land that would eventually become the United States. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, he never made it to what is now the United States at all.¹³

He died on May 20, 1506, in Valladolid, Spain, believing to the end that he had reached the Indies, the islands off Southeast Asia.¹⁴ This is not a disputed point of historiography. The man honored by the federal holiday believed he had discovered a western route to Asia. He was wrong about that too. The federal government has been commemorating his discovery of America for 56 years, and the honoree himself would not have recognized the claim.

The question of who actually first reached North America from Europe is not difficult to answer. Around the year 1000, roughly five centuries before Columbus set sail, the Norse explorer Leif Eriksson established a settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in what is now Newfoundland, Canada. The site has been archaeologically excavated, confirmed, and designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.¹⁵ In 1497, five years after Columbus’s first voyage, John Cabot reached the North American mainland, likely Newfoundland, under the English flag.¹⁶ Neither man has a federal holiday. Eriksson’s settlement predates Columbus by half a millennium and actually stands on the continent. Cabot actually reached the mainland of North America. Congress commemorates neither of them. Congress commemorates the man who went to the Bahamas and thought it was Asia.

IV. The Commemoration of a Non-Event

A commemoration is a speech act. It asserts that something happened and that the happening is worth marking. President Harrison’s 1892 proclamation asserted the “discovery of America.” The 1968 enactment retained the name Columbus Day, and the Office of Personnel Management continues to list it as such. The assertion embedded in the federal holiday is therefore this: Christopher Columbus discovered America, and the United States marks the discovery with a paid day off for its workforce.

Every element of the assertion fails. Columbus did not discover America, because the continents were already home to millions of Indigenous people living within established civilizations, sophisticated agricultural systems, and extensive trading networks.¹⁷ The discovery premise treats the continent’s existing inhabitants as non-parties to the transaction. The auditors noted this and found it immaterial to the payroll question, which proceeds on the statute’s own terms. But even setting that aside, even granting the Eurocentric premise that discovery means first European arrival, Columbus was not first. Eriksson was first, by five hundred years, with an excavated settlement to prove it. Cabot reached the mainland in 1497. Columbus reached the Bahamas in 1492, Cuba and Hispaniola thereafter, and the Central and South American coasts on later voyages, and he died convinced he had found Asia. The holiday does not commemorate the first European arrival in the Americas. It does not commemorate the first European arrival in North America. It does not commemorate the first European arrival in the United States. It commemorates a landing in the Bahamas by a man who misidentified the hemisphere.

The legal significance of this is not that the history is embarrassing. The legal significance is that a holiday is defined by its occasion, and the occasion specified by Congress is the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus. If the discovery did not occur, the occasion does not exist. If the occasion does not exist, the day is not a holiday. It is a Monday on which 2.09 million people are excused from duty with pay for no reason that the statute can supply. Section 6103(b) grants pay and leave treatment “with respect to a legal public holiday.” A day commemorating nothing is not a holiday within the meaning of the provision. It is a clerical artifact with a payroll.

V. The Payroll

The Office of Personnel Management publishes a profile of the federal civilian workforce. The current profile reports total employment of 2,087,747 and an average annual base salary, adjusted to include locality pay, of $84,913 for full-time permanent employees.¹⁸ The arithmetic that follows is not disputed by anyone, because it is arithmetic.

At $84,913 per year, the average federal employee earns approximately $326.59 per workday, assuming 260 workdays per year. Multiplied across 2,087,747 employees, the daily wage bill for the federal civilian workforce is approximately $681.8 million. A single Columbus Day observance therefore costs the Treasury roughly $682 million in salary paid for work not performed. The employees are not at fault. They are following the statute. The statute is following a man who went to the Bahamas.

Columbus Day has been observed on the second Monday in October continuously since 1971. That is 56 observances at current staffing and pay levels. The cumulative wage bill for 56 years of commemorating the non-discovery is approximately $38.2 billion. Earlier workforces were smaller and earlier salaries were lower, so the historical figure is less; the current figure is more. The direction of the error does not change the conclusion. The Treasury has spent tens of billions of dollars, over more than half a century, paying its workforce to observe an event that, by the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s account, never involved the United States, the North American mainland, or even the correct continent in the honoree’s own mind.

For comparison, the Government Accountability Office’s improper-payment reporting tracks payments that should not have been made or were made in the wrong amount. A payment made “with respect to a legal public holiday” that is not, in fact, a holiday, because the commemorated event did not occur, would appear to meet the definition. The GAO has not, to this publication’s knowledge, evaluated whether $38.2 billion in wages paid in honor of a voyage that never reached the honoree’s country constitutes an improper payment. The oversight is understandable. Auditors are trained to follow the money. This time the trail ends on a calendar square.

VI. The Field That Does Not Exist

The counterargument is well known and will be stated fairly. Many Americans observe the second Monday in October not as Columbus Day but as Indigenous Peoples’ Day, honoring the peoples who inhabited the Americas for millennia before 1492 and acknowledging the devastation that followed European colonization. According to the Pew Research Center, 30 states and three United States territories recognize Columbus Day in some form, while 17 states and the District of Columbia commemorate Indigenous people on that day, with several states recognizing both.¹⁹ The first presidential proclamation recognizing Indigenous Peoples’ Day was issued by President Joe Biden on October 8, 2021, and he issued further proclamations in subsequent years.²⁰ In October 2025, President Trump signed a proclamation reclaiming Columbus Day and its “extraordinary legacy,” making no mention of Indigenous Peoples’ Day, after declaring in April that he would bring the holiday “back from the ashes.”²¹

None of this changes the payroll. A presidential proclamation is not a statute. It does not amend 5 U.S.C. § 6103. It does not create a paid holiday for federal employees. When President Biden proclaimed Indigenous Peoples’ Day, federal employees received no new leave, because there was no new leave to receive; the leave they received was Columbus Day leave, granted by the statute, under the Columbus Day designation, for the Columbus Day holiday. When President Trump proclaimed Columbus Day in 2025, he added nothing either, because the statute had already done the work in 1968.

This produces the following documented reality. A federal employee in Maine, which observes Indigenous Peoples’ Day, who takes the second Monday in October off, is recorded in the federal payroll system as taking Columbus Day leave. There is no other code. The federal personnel system has no field for Indigenous Peoples’ Day, because no statute or executive order has created one. The field is creatable; it has not been created. It cannot record it, cannot pay for it, and cannot close an office for it. The employee may believe, in good faith, that they are observing Indigenous Peoples’ Day. The government’s books record that they are observing Columbus Day. The books are the law. The belief is a proclamation.

The consequence is the one stated in the headline. The United States federal government is legally incapable of observing Indigenous Peoples’ Day on the second Monday in October. It lacks the statutory field. The only commemoration Congress funds on that day is of an event that did not take place. The workforce is paid $682 million per observance to honor the non-discovery, and the alternative commemoration, the one with the stronger historical claim, cannot be entered into the system at all.

VII. The Proclamation Gap

The history of presidential proclamations on this subject is a study in the limits of the instrument. President Biden became the first president to officially recognize Indigenous Peoples’ Day, issuing his first proclamation on October 8, 2021, for October 11 of that year.²⁰ He issued further proclamations in the following years. Each proclamation was, legally, a statement of recognition. Recognition is not compensation. No federal employee received an additional day of leave. No federal office closed an additional day. Section 6103 continued to list eleven holidays, and Indigenous Peoples’ Day continued to be absent from it.

President Trump’s October 2025 proclamation took the opposite approach, reclaiming Columbus Day’s “extraordinary legacy of faith, courage, perseverance, and virtue” and accusing critics of attempting to destroy Columbus’s name.²¹ Like its predecessor, the proclamation changed nothing in the law, because there was nothing in the law that needed changing. Columbus Day was already a federal holiday. It had been one since 1971. The proclamation reclaimed a legacy that the statute had never surrendered.

The pattern is instructive. When Congress wants to create a federal holiday, it passes a statute. It did so for Juneteenth in 2021, the first new federal holiday since the Birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1983.⁵ When a president wants federal employees off without Congress, the president issues an executive order, as happens most Christmases. When a president wants to recognize a day without either, the president issues a proclamation. Biden’s Indigenous Peoples’ Day proclamations took the third path, the one that creates no leave. The proclamation is then reported as news, debated as culture, and recorded nowhere in the payroll system. The gap between proclamation and statute is the gap between saying something and paying for it. On the second Monday in October, the government pays for Columbus.

VIII. The Improper Payment

The Payment Integrity Information Act of 2019 defines an improper payment to include any payment that should not have been made or was made in an incorrect amount under statutory, contractual, administrative, or other legally applicable requirements.²² The law requires the payment to be measured against “legally applicable requirements.” The legally applicable requirement here is 5 U.S.C. § 6103, which provides pay and leave treatment “with respect to a legal public holiday.”

The question is whether Columbus Day is a legal public holiday. The statute says it is. It also says what it is: Columbus Day, a commemoration of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of America. A commemoration asserts an event. The event did not occur. Columbus did not discover America. He did not reach the United States. He did not reach North America. He reached the Bahamas, Cuba, and Hispaniola, and explored the coasts of Central and South America, and he died believing he had reached Asia. The peoples he encountered had been there for millennia. The Europeans who reached North America first were Norse, five hundred years earlier.

A legal instrument that designates a commemoration of a non-event is void for failure of its operative premise. This is the same principle that voids a contract for the sale of a thing that does not exist. The designation fails because there is nothing to designate. The day is not a holiday. It is a Monday. The pay and leave treatment granted “with respect to a legal public holiday” therefore lacks a legally applicable requirement, and the payment should not have been made. The $682 million disbursed for today’s observance is an improper payment. The $38.2 billion disbursed across 56 observances is 56 improper payments, or one continuous improper payment, depending on how the auditors prefer to count.

The objection will be raised that Congress may designate any day it pleases, and that the factual accuracy of the occasion is not a condition of the holiday’s legality. The audit does not dispute Congress’s power; it disputes the accounting treatment. The Payment Integrity Information Act measures payments against “legally applicable requirements,” and a requirement that commemorates an event that did not occur supplies no requirement at all. Congress may designate a day in honor of an event it presents as fiction; what it may not do is designate a commemoration that asserts as fact an event that did not occur. The designation fails of its operative premise, like a patent claim describing a perpetual-motion machine. The point is that Congress has exercised the power to commemorate something that did not happen, at a cost of $682 million per year, while declining to exercise the same power to commemorate something that did. The statute is valid. The commemoration is void. The payroll is improper. Congress’s power to designate is not in question. The auditors’ finding is.

IX. The Remedy

There are, in principle, two lawful courses. The first is for Congress to amend 5 U.S.C. § 6103 to designate a commemoration with a factual basis. The amended statute could honor Leif Eriksson, whose settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows is excavated, confirmed, and standing on the continent, or John Cabot, who actually reached the North American mainland, or the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, whose presence predates every European voyage by millennia. Any of these would supply the statute with an occasion that occurred. Congress has shown it can do this; it added Juneteenth by statute in 2021.

The second course is recovery. If the payments were improper, they are subject to the government’s recovery authorities, and the 2.09 million employees who received Columbus Day leave over the years would, in principle, owe the Treasury the wages for days on which no legal public holiday occurred. The practical difficulties are acknowledged. Collecting $38.2 billion from the federal workforce for 56 years of Mondays would be administratively complex. The employees acted in good faith reliance on the statute. The statute, however, commemorated nothing, and good faith reliance on a commemoration of nothing is still reliance on nothing.

A third course will be proposed, which is to do nothing and to continue paying $682 million per year in honor of the non-discovery while issuing annual proclamations recognizing the peoples who were actually here. This is, in fact, the current course. It has the advantage of familiarity. It has the disadvantage of being the precise arrangement this investigation has shown to be improper. The government will presumably continue it, because the alternative is to admit that the payroll system has been commemorating the Bahamas since 1971.

X. Conclusion

On October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus landed in the Bahamas. On October 12, 2026, by the accident of the calendar, the United States observes Columbus Day on the actual anniversary of that landing for the first time in years. The landing was not in the United States. Columbus never set foot in the United States. He never set foot in North America. He died believing he had reached Asia.

The statute commands the commemoration. The Treasury funds it, at roughly $682 million per observance. The personnel system records it, under a name that cannot be changed by proclamation. The alternative commemoration, honoring the peoples who inhabited the Americas for millennia before any European arrived, cannot be recorded at all, because the statute has no field for it.

The federal government is therefore paying its workforce more than half a billion dollars per year to commemorate an event that did not take place, and it is legally incapable of commemorating the alternative. The auditors have not noticed. The money leads to a Monday. Ergo.