Someone Changed Federal Workers’ Shutdown Out-of-Office Emails
The messages were manipulated after the workers were already furloughed in order to blame Democrats.

Five civil servants working at the Department of Education told NBC News that their out-of-office messages had been altered with political language blaming Democrats for the government shutdown.
The new message read: “Thank you for contacting me. On September 10, 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. Due to the lapse of appropriations, I am currently in furlough status. I will respond to emails once government functions resume,” NBC reported Thursday.
It may sound old-fashioned, but typically, civil servants don’t make political comments like that—at least ones who follow the Hatch Act, which forbids federal employees from engaging in certain political activities in their official capacities.
One Department of Education employee, speaking anonymously, said that they restored their out-of-office message to the original neutral version, only to have the partisan language added back.
“None of us consented to this. And it’s written in the first-person, as if I’m the one conveying this message, and I’m not,” the person told NBC News. “I don’t agree with it. I don’t think it’s ethical or legal. I think it violates the Hatch Act.”
Another employee anonymously told NBC News that they’d used the standard out-of-office message that the agency had disseminated to them earlier this week. Even that was changed. “They went in and manipulated my out-of-office reply. I guess they’re now making us all guilty of violating the Hatch Act,” the person said.
A third employee told NBC News that they weren’t surprised by the apparent violation of the Hatch Act, or concerned that they might face repercussions for political speech they hadn’t actually made. “Nobody follows the law anymore, so why does it matter? It seems like laws are dotted lines now, not solid lines. It seems there’s no one to hold this administration accountable to laws,” they said.
“Clearly, this wasn’t done by me, it was done while I was in a furlough status, I think I’d be able to argue that point,” the employee added.
The Trump administration issued multiple rounds of emails via executive agency heads this week containing ideological messaging to thousands of federal employees, in potential violation of the Hatch Act and the Standards of Ethical Conduct for Employees of the Executive Branch. Workers at the Treasury Department, Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Social Security Administration received near-identical notes claiming that the Democrats had thwarted the Republicans’ continuing resolution due to “unrelated policy concerns.” In reality, Democrats had been fighting to ensure health care subsidies.
As desperate as Donald Trump has been to blame Democrats for the shutdown, it doesn’t seem that Americans are buying it. A recent poll found that roughly 47 percent of respondents blamed Republicans, while 30 percent said that Democrats were primarily responsible. Twenty-three percent of those surveyed said they were not sure who was primarily responsible for the shutdown.