NPR reports on how the Trump administration is displaying messages on agency websites blaming the Democratic Party for the government shutdown and communicating such messages internally, actions that may run afoul of ethics laws:
A bright red banner and pop-up message first appeared Tuesday on the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s website. It was updated early Wednesday morning and warns: “The Radical Left in Congress shut down the government. HUD will use available resources to help Americans in need.”
Wednesday morning, a banner added to the top of Department of Justice websites reads “Democrats have shut down the government” with a link to its shutdown plans.
Staffers at multiple agencies and Cabinet departments received emails on Tuesday from the White House Office of Management and Budget. Many shared screenshots of those emails with NPR, or confirmed the text of the message they received. The messages said any lapse in government funding would be “forced by Congressional Democrats.”
This includes instructions for out-of-office reply emails, as Wired reports:
At 9:35 am on Wednesday, the first morning of the US government shutdown, employees at the Small Business Administration (SBA) received a template from human resources for their suggested —-of-office” email. They were advised to blame the Democrats.
“I am out of office for the foreseeable future because Senate Democrats voted to block a clean federal spending bill (HR 5371), leading to a government shutdown that is preventing the US Small Business Administration from serving America’s 36 million small businesses. 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.”
The email goes on to say that once the shutdown is over, “we are prepared to immediately return to the record-breaking services we are providing under the leadership of the Trump Administration.”
“My jaw dropped when I read it,” says an SBA employee who asked to remain anonymous because they are not authorized to speak to the press. The employee says they worried that if someone actually used the email template, it “would be a blatant violation of the Hatch Act.”
