A growing number of US federal agencies and their staff are using official communications to blame Democrats for the ongoing government shutdown, in what critics say may be a violation of the Hatch Act. The 1939 law prohibits federal employees from engaging in partisan political activity while on duty.
Furloughed workers at some agencies have been instructed to set out-of-office messages stating they are not working because of a Democrat-led shutdown. Government websites, including those of the Treasury Department and the Department of Agriculture, have displayed similar language, referring to a “Radical Left Democrat shutdown”. The Treasury site stated: “The radical left has chosen to shut down the United States government in the name of reckless spending and obstructionism.”
According to sources at the Department of Education, officials changed the language in employees’ automated email replies without their knowledge or approval. One employee, speaking on condition of anonymity, said: “This message is uniform and provided to us by the Department. We all enabled the auto-reply before logging off for the shutdown. However, the Department has gone in without our knowledge or approval and changed the message.”
Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin, a Democrat and constitutional lawyer, accused the administration of turning taxpayer-funded resources into “MAGA propaganda organs” in what he called a “naked violation” of the Hatch Act. “If any agency head under any previous Administration ever used official letterhead to promote their political views, they would have been instantly fired, if not prosecuted,” he said.
Donald Sherman, executive director of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, described the messaging as “extraordinarily irresponsible and inappropriate”. He added: “This is clearly behaviour that does not comport with ethical guidance. Some of it, I think, is illegal.” Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group, has filed a complaint against the Small Business Administration over its website message blaming Democrats for the shutdown.
