Furloughed Employees Sue Administration For Adding Partisan Wording To Their Out-Of-Office Messages

from the humans-absolutely-devoid-of-humanity dept

Here comes more pathetic, childish bullshit from an administration that has made petty bullshit its brand. The just completed government shutdown caused problems everywhere. The Trump administration knew its refusal to compromise on the budget bill was going to hurt it, so it did everything it could to reshape the narrative, even as it somehow retained the funding to argue against things like… ensuring SNAP benefits are paid out to recipients.

Ever since the government went down, the Trump administration converted agencies that are supposed to be apolitical entities into proxy mouthpieces for its ridiculous attempts to heap the blame on the party that isn’t in power. Here’s how that went, as described by DC federal court judge Christopher Cooper in his ruling [PDF] in favor of government employees whose inaccessible email accounts had been hijacked by the Trump administration. (h/t Kyle Cheney)

Over a month ago, the Executive Branch launched a multifront campaign to assign blame for the government shutdown. It began by plastering politically-charged language on official public websites. See, e.g., Compl. ¶¶ 17 (Department of Housing and Urban Development: “The Radical Left in Congress shut down the government.”), (Department of Justice: “Democrats have shut down the government.”), (Department of State: “Due to the Democrat-led shutdown, website updates will be limited until full operations resume.”), (Department of Agriculture: “Due to the Radical Left Democrat shutdown, this government website will not be updated during the funding lapse. President Trump has made it clear he wants to keep the government open and support those who feed, fuel, and clothe the American people.”), (Small Business Administration: “Every day that Senate Democrats continue to oppose a clean funding bill, they are stopping an estimated 320 small businesses from accessing $170 million in SBA guaranteed funding.”), (Department of the Treasury: “The radical left has chosen to shut down the United States government in the name of reckless spending and obstructionism.”), (Department of Health and Human Services: “Mission-critical activities of HHS will continue during the Democrat-led government shutdown. Please use this site as a resource as the Trump Administration works to reopen the government for the American people.”).

All of that is highly concerning, if not actually a violation of appropriations laws. While it’s completely normal for partisan politicians to blame the members of other parties for government shutdowns, it’s beyond the normally-accepted pale to convert federal websites into bullhorns for partisan hackery and straight-up gaslighting.

Nothing succeeds like excess, which is the only thing this administration knows. Back to Judge Cooper:

Apparently, that wasn’t enough. The Department waited until its furloughed employees lost access to their email, then gratuitously changed their out-of-office messages to include yet another partisan message, thereby turning its own workforce into political spokespeople through their official email accounts. The Department may have added insult to injury, but it also overplayed its hand.

That paragraph arrives 34 pages into the 36-page decision, which makes it apparent where it’s headed. Of course, reading it through from the beginning would also give you a good idea where it’s headed. And it’s worth doing that, because the court tangles with the hazier aspects of First Amendment law.

Compelled speech is always a constitutional problem. But adding bits of stuff to government employees’ (automated) speech isn’t necessarily as obvious of a problem, considering they’re still considered to be employees of the administration that currently controls the White House.

This, however, is so far out of the ordinary that it can’t possibly be considered constitutional, as the court explains. It’s one thing to generate out-of-office messages on behalf of furloughed employees. It’s quite another to lock them out of their accounts and then add gratuitous partisan attacks that will often be assumed by recipients to be the furloughed employees’ personal take on the government shutdown.

The government’s defense of these actions is ultra-weird. I mean, it would have to be. No other administration has ever done this. And it’s likely no other administration has ever considered doing this, much less the commandeering of public-facing websites to engage in attacks on the opposing party.

The original messages notifying citizens of interruptions in service due to the shutdown simply stated the facts: the person they were trying to reach had been furloughed and would not be back to work until government funding resumed.

Shortly after they were furloughed, their out-of-office messages were hijacked by administration officials to say this:

The Department employee you have contacted is currently in furlough status. On September 19, 2025, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 5371, a clean continuing resolution. Unfortunately, Democrat Senators are blocking passage of H.R. 5371 in the Senate which has led to a lapse in appropriations. The employee you have contacted will respond to emails once government functions resume.

Now, if any employee had chosen to do this on their own, they could conceivably be reprimanded or fired for using their government email account to engage in partisan politics. I mean, obviously this message would never get anyone fired by this administration, but the government could have removed the employee without worrying too much about violating their First Amendment rights.

But this is the flip side of this theoretical: this is the government inserting partisan speech into email auto-responses. And since the government (as a whole) is the more powerful entity here, it’s compelled speech — compelled speech that occurred often without the knowledge of the person who’s mouth was being filled with the administration’s words.

The government’s arguments are terrible. First, it claims (as it almost always does immediately after being sued) that the court (whatever court it is) doesn’t have jurisdiction. In this case, it says it’s a labor dispute that should be resolved administratively through internal channels, rather than be treated like the constitutional violation it so very obviously is.

The court is having none of this bullshit. It simply points out the obvious: the government was shut down and the internal channels were closed, along with much of the rest of it, until finally reopening today. If the case was delayed until the budget bills passed, the administration would be allowed to continue to engage in compelled speech and then declare the whole thing moot once the proper channels for employment complaints were reopened.

Furthermore, this is a constitutional claim, which is definitely the sort of thing federal courts are allowed to review, no matter what “proper channels” already exist. A court may decide the case should be handled through those channels after further review of the facts. But it is completely false to claim the court cannot handle this case ever, no matter what internal administrative options might otherwise exist.

The government also says this case is already moot because it has clawed back the wording it inserted into government employees’ email messages. The court says that definitely doesn’t mean the case is moot, especially given the timing of the removal:

[T]he Department’s prompt recission of the Original Message after the Department of Justice received AFGE’s [American Federal Government Employees] cease-and-desist letter is likely indicative of the message’s unconstitutionality.

The court discusses (and discards) some other procedural arguments from the government before making everything clear. While this is certainly unprecedented, it doesn’t mean it’s OK simply because this nation hasn’t encountered this particular brand of petty bullshit before:

[F]or all its novelty, this case does not lack for clarity. When government employees enter public service, they do not sign away their First Amendment rights, and they certainly do not sign up to be a billboard for any given administration’s partisan views.

Expanding further, the court delivers what should be the death knell, but will only trigger endless rounds of appeals until Clarence Thomas or somefuckingbody says “Hey, the government owns these people so they can be forced to say whatever the government wants them to say.”

Nonpartisanship is the bedrock of the federal civil service; it ensures that career government employees serve the public, not the politicians. But by commandeering its employees’ e-mail accounts to broadcast partisan messages, the Department chisels away at that foundation. Political officials are free to blame whomever they wish for the shutdown, but they cannot use rank-and-file civil servants as their unwilling spokespeople. The First Amendment stands in their way. The Department’s conduct therefore must cease.

It’s amazing that this ever needed to be said by a federal judge. This has always been obvious, which is why only the most willfully oblivious presidential administration in the history of this nation has even tried it. It was already fucked up when it turned government agency websites into GO TEAM TRUMP billboards. It’s even more fucked up that it thought it could do the same thing to thousands of federal employees during a government shutdown the GOP could have easily averted.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, american federation of government employees, bullshit, compelled speech, department of education, free speech, government shutdown, playing to the cheap seats, trump administration