As the government prepared for a shutdown this week, a half dozen government agencies emailed employees with a curious message: Democrats are to blame.
“President Trump opposes a government shutdown, and strongly supports the enactment of H.R. 5371, which is a clean Continuing Resolution to fund the government through November 21, and already passed the U.S. House of Representatives,” reads the first line of the email. “Unfortunately, Democrats are blocking this Continuing Resolution in the U.S. Senate due to unrelated policy demands.”
The emails, obtained by MSNBC, were sent to employees at Health and Human Services, the Social Security Administration, the Small Business Administration, the Department of Interior and the Department of Labor — with the subject line “Planning for Potential Lapse in Funding.”
While agencies usually send emails preparing their workforce for furloughs on the brink of a shutdown, the partisan language directly blaming Democrats is highly unusual and potentially violates rules prohibiting government resources from being used for political or campaign purposes.
The Radical Left are going to shut down the government and inflict massive pain on the American people unless they get their $1.5 trillion wish list of demands.”
Hud website
The emails come as the Housing and Urban Development Agency added a banner to its official government landing page also pointing the finger at Democrats for the shutdown.
“The Radical Left are going to shut down the government and inflict massive pain on the American people unless they get their $1.5 trillion wish list of demands. The Trump administration wants to keep the government open for the American people,” the banner read on Tuesday.
That HUD post caught the attention of some Senate Democrats — like Sen. Andy Kim, of New Jersey, who told MSNBC on Wednesday that his Democratic colleagues were discussing the best way to respond to language that “clearly crosses the line.”
“I worked as a civil servant under both Republicans and Democrats,” Kim said. “We got plenty of briefings on what we’re allowed to say, what we’re not allowed to say. This clearly crosses the line. … It is abusing government taxpayer dollars for political purposes.”
Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., who’s also a former-fed-turned-senator, told MSNBC on Wednesday that she thinks the messages are “a violation of the Hatch Act,” which prevents government resources from being used for political purposes.
“I think it’s another data point of people in power using power for their own political gain, for their own political purposes, and as a stick of their own political retribution,” Slotkin said.
Sen. Jim Banks, R-Ind., however, downplayed the concerns, saying what he sees in the agency language seems “completely accurate.” Asked how he would’ve reacted to a hypothetical Democratic administration that blamed a “radical right” for a shutdown using taxpayer funded tools, Banks dodged the question. “In this case, Democrats are taking a radical position,” Banks said. But not every Republican was so pleased with the partisan messages. On Wednesday, former Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan — who left the GOP in 2019 over his Trump opposition, first becoming an Independent, then becoming a registered Libertarian and then once again declaring himself a Republican to run for Michigan’s GOP Senate nomination in 2024 — posted about his opposition to the messages on X, saying a partisan message on the U.S. Forest Service’s website was helping the Trump administration “set new records for cringe.” “Also, to anyone at the @forestservice, the verb form is ‘shut down,’ not ‘shutdown,’” Amash posted. While agencies usually send emails preparing their workforce for furloughs on the brink of a shutdown, the partisan language directly blaming Democrats is highly unusual and potentially violates rules prohibiting government resources from being used for political or campaign purposes.
Laura Barrón-López covers the White House for MS NOW.
Ali Vitali is MS NOW's senior congressional correspondent and the host of "Way Too Early." She is the author of "Electable: Why America Hasn’t Put a Woman in the White House … Yet." Recommended
