House Democrats are primed to remove a provision of federal worker pay legislation set for a floor vote Wednesday that would have continued a pay freeze for Vice President Mike Pence and other senior Trump administration officials.

The Rules Committee adopted the changes as part of a self-executing rule for floor debate on the underlying bill, which would give the roughly 2 million federal civilian employees a 2.6 percent pay raise this year. That would put civilian workers on par with military servicemembers, who got the same raise in the fiscal 2019 Defense appropriations bill enacted last year.

Rep. Gerald E. Connolly, D-Va., the bill’s lead sponsor, said continuing the executive-level pay freeze would have jeopardized the broader bill. “We want to stick with the main thing,” he said.

The statutory pay freeze for Pence, Cabinet officials and other senior White House political appointees, which has in place since 2013, will come out of the underlying bill once the House adopts the rule for floor debate. Pence, who makes $230,700 now, and other affected senior officials would get the same 2.6 percent raise as other civilian workers under Connolly’s bill, if the rule is adopted and the bill becomes law.

Connolly said the Congressional Budget Office has told him the cost of implementing the 2.6 percent pay bump would be around $5 billion to $6 billion. But he estimates that when measured against a 2.1 percent increase that would otherwise take effect under a 1990 law, the cost increase would only be around $1 billion.