Education Department out-of-office emails violated First Amendment : NPR

A federal judge ruled that the Trump administration violated the First Amendment rights of Education Department employees when it replaced their personalized out-of-office e-mail notifications with partisan language blaming Democrats for the government shutdown.

“When government employees enter public service, they do not sign away their First Amendment rights,” U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper wrote in his decision on Friday, “and they certainly do not sign up to be a billboard for any given administration’s partisan views.”

The lawsuit was brought by the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE).

“This ridiculous ploy by the Trump administration was a clear violation of the First Amendment rights of the workers at the Education Department,” said Rachel Gittleman, the president of AFGE Local 252, which represents many Education Department workers, in a statement. She added it is “one of the many ways the Department’s leadership has threatened, harassed and demoralized these hardworking public servants in the last 10 months.”

Cooper ordered the department to restore union members’ personalized out-of-office email notices immediately. If that could not be done, he warned, then the department would be required to remove the partisan language from all employees’ accounts, union member or not.

According to court records, in the run-up to the government shutdown, Education Department employees were told to create an out-of-office message for their government email accounts to be used while workers were furloughed. The department even gave employees boilerplate language they could adapt that simply said:

“We are unable to respond to your request due to a lapse in appropriations for the Department of Education. We will respond to your request when appropriations are enacted. Thank you.”

But, on the shutdown’s first day, the department’s deputy chief of staff for operations overrode staffers’ personal messages and replaced them with a partisan autoreply.

While the message was written in the first person, multiple employees told NPR they did not write it and were not told it would replace the out-of-office messages they had written.

At the time, Madi Biedermann, deputy assistant secretary for communications, said in a statement to NPR: “The email reminds those who reach out to Department of Education employees that we cannot respond because Senate Democrats are refusing to vote for a clean CR and fund the government. Where’s the lie?”

In his decision, Cooper lambasted the department for “turning its own workforce into political spokespeople through their official email accounts. The Department may have added insult to injury, but it also overplayed its hand.”

The department did not respond to an NPR request to comment on the ruling.

“Nonpartisanship is the foundation of the federal civil-service system,” Cooper wrote, a principle that Congress enshrined in the Hatch Act.

That law, passed in 1939, was intended to protect public employees from political pressure and, according to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, “to ensure that federal programs are administered in a nonpartisan fashion.”