A federal judge in Washington has slammed the U.S. Department of Education for hijacking employees’ out-of-office messages to push a partisan narrative during the government shutdown — one that pinned the blame squarely on “Democrat Senators.”
The ruling, delivered by U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper, declared the move a violation of workers’ free speech rights, saying the administration had crossed a constitutional line by forcing nonpartisan civil servants into political messaging.
“Officials can blame whoever they want,” Cooper wrote, “but they can’t conscript public employees to echo their talking points.”
The dispute began when the American Federation of Government Employees, the nation’s largest federal workers’ union, sued after discovering that furloughed Education Department staffers’ automatic replies had been rewritten to blame Democrats for the shutdown.
Cooper ordered the agency to strip the partisan line from the emails of union members — and warned that if technical limits made it impossible to isolate those accounts, the directive would apply to everyone at the department.
The shutdown, now in its 38th day — the longest in U.S. history — has shuttered services, halted paychecks, and pushed critical systems to the brink. Millions have lost food aid, and airlines are preparing for sharp flight cuts as air traffic controllers dwindle.
While Democrats have refused to approve a spending bill lacking extensions for health insurance subsidies, the Trump administration has seized every platform available — from airport videos to agency websites — to lay the blame on them.
Judge Cooper’s decision, however, carves out one clear boundary amid the political noise: public servants are not megaphones for political blame games.
