So federal workers are being handed scripts to blame Democrats for the government shutdown. Let me explain why this is actually a big deal – and not just another day in the political circus.
Yesterday morning, Small Business Administration employees opened their work email to find something unusual. HR had sent them a template for their out-of-office messages. Nothing weird about that during a shutdown, right? Except this template wasn’t just informing people they’d be unavailable. It was a partisan attack ad masquerading as an auto-reply.
“I am out of office for the foreseeable future because Senate Democrats voted to block a clean federal funding bill, leading to a government shutdown that is preventing the U.S. Small Business Administration from serving America’s 36 million small businesses.”
It gets worse. The template goes on to claim that “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.” Then it wraps up by promising to return to the “record-breaking services we are providing under the leadership of the Trump Administration.”
One SBA employee who spoke anonymously said their jaw dropped when they read it. They worried that actually using the template would be “a blatant violation of the Hatch Act.” And they’re probably right to worry.
The Hatch Act – passed back in 1939 – exists specifically to keep federal employees from engaging in partisan political activity while they’re on the job. The whole point is to maintain a federal workforce that isn’t weaponized for political purposes. Federal workers are supposed to serve all Americans, not function as campaign operatives for whichever party controls the White House.
But The SBA wasn’t alone. Multiple federal agencies pulled similar stunts. The Department of Housing and Urban Development slapped a bright red banner across their website that screamed “The Radical Left in Congress shut down the government.” The Department of Veterans Affairs sent out messages blaming “radical liberals in Congress” for trying to achieve their “crazy fantasy of open borders, ‘transgender’ for everybody and men competing in women’s sports.”
The Department of Labor, the Department of Health and Human Services, the State Department, the Treasury Department, and the Forest Service all sent out similar messages. We’re talking about a coordinated effort across the entire federal government to push partisan talking points.
Now, ethics experts are split on whether this technically violates the Hatch Act. Some argue it doesn’t cross the line because it’s not advocating for specific candidates or commenting on an election. Others say it absolutely violates the spirit of the law, even if it dances around the letter of it.
Donald Sherman from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington put it well: “Agency leadership’s job in this moment is to provide nonpartisan service to their constituents, not politicize the situation and blame political enemies.”
Compare this to how previous administrations handled shutdowns. During the 2013 shutdown under Obama – which lasted more than two weeks – the president wrote a letter to federal employees that thanked them for their service and criticized Congress for failing to meet its responsibility. He didn’t mention Republicans by name. That’s how it’s supposed to work.
But Trump fired Hampton Dellinger, the head of the Office of Special Counsel that enforces the Hatch Act, earlier this year. So the watchdog that’s supposed to investigate these violations has been effectively neutered. One federal worker told NPR: “We just all accept that the Hatch Act is null and void. Nothing matters.”
About 750,000 federal workers are currently furloughed. At the SBA alone, 1,456 employees – 23% of the agency’s workforce – aren’t getting paychecks. And instead of getting straightforward information about the shutdown and what services are affected, they’re getting talking points that read like they came straight from a campaign strategist’s playbook.
The whole situation raises a pretty basic question: are federal agencies supposed to serve the American public, or are they supposed to serve as propaganda arms for whoever’s in the White House? Because those are two very different things.
Federal employees didn’t sign up to be political operatives. They signed up to do a job – processing small business loans, helping veterans, managing public housing, regulating workplace safety. Their job is to serve all Americans regardless of political affiliation. That’s the entire point of having a professional civil service instead of a spoils system where everyone gets fired when administrations change.
When you turn federal agencies into partisan attack machines, you’re not just violating norms or pushing ethical boundaries. You’re fundamentally changing what it means to have a government that works for everyone. You’re telling federal workers that their real job isn’t serving the public – it’s carrying water for the administration that happens to be in power.
And maybe that’s the point. Maybe the goal is to destroy any remaining trust in government institutions by turning them into openly partisan operations. If you can’t tell the difference between a federal agency and a campaign committee, why would you trust anything the government tells you?
The SBA spokesperson said the template language was “optional” and “rooted in fact.” But that misses the entire point. Federal employees shouldn’t be put in a position where they have to choose between using partisan messaging or writing their own neutral out-of-office replies. The fact that HR sent out the template at all tells you everything you need to know about what the administration expects.
One more thing worth noting – Republicans controlled both chambers of Congress and the White House when this shutdown happened. The House passed a continuing resolution, but the Senate couldn’t get it through because Democrats wanted to include things like extending Affordable Care Act subsidies and rolling back some Medicaid cuts. You can argue about whether those demands are reasonable, but calling it a “clean” funding bill when the other party has specific objections is just messaging.
Shutdowns happen when both sides can’t reach an agreement. Pretending it’s entirely one party’s fault – and using federal employees as messengers for that narrative – turns government into partisan theater. And we’ve already got plenty of that without dragging civil servants into it.