From inside the White House to the banners plastered on government websites, Donald Trump and administration officials are explicitly blaming Democratic members of Congress for the federal shutdown.
Watchdog groups say the statements are in apparent defiance of ethics laws that prohibit political attacks and campaigning from inside federal facilities — which the president has continued to do since entering office without facing any consequences.
“The Radical Left in Congress shut down the government,” according to a large pop-up message and a bright red banner on the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s website.
Another message at the top of the Department of Justice website says, “Democrats have shut down the government.”
“Due to the Democrat-led shutdown, website updates will be limited until full operations resume,” according to a red banner on the State Department’s website.
A massive brown banner on the Department of Agriculture reads: “Due to the Radical Left Democrat shutdown, this government website will not be updated during the funding lapse. President Trump has made it clear he wants to keep the government open and support those who feed, fuel, and clothe the American people.”
The Small Business Administration’s website twice blames “Senate Democrats” in a long screed at the top of its website.
And on the White House website, a message reading “Democrats Have Shut Down The Government” displays alongside a timer showing how long the shutdown has been in effect.
Democratic members of Congress have accused Trump and Republicans of blatantly lying about Democratic opposition to a GOP-led government funding plan, particularly around claims that Democrats are pushing for healthcare benefits for undocumented immigrants, who cannot legally access federal healthcare programs.
Democratic officials have also rejected Republican attempts to blame them for mass layoffs and furloughs of federal employees, arguing that the administration is using the shutdown crisis as a pretext to slash budgets and fire workers.
“These are all things that the Trump administration has been doing since Jan. 20,” Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries said Wednesday.
The Trump administration’s messaging is in stark contrast to more restrained language from the federal government during previous funding crises; in 2013, then-President Barack Obama said that Congress “failed to meet its responsibility” by approving a spending plan, without mentioning the Republicans who blocked it.
“This shutdown was completely preventable,” he wrote at the time. “It should not have happened. And the House of Representatives can end it as soon as it follows the Senate’s lead, and funds your work in the United States Government without trying to attach highly controversial and partisan measures in the process.”
In the hours before the latest shutdown, a memo from White House Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought to department chiefs blamed the crisis on “insane policy demands” from congressional Democrats.
Ahead of Tuesday’s midnight deadline to fund the government, Vought’s office sent employees at several agencies and Cabinet departments an email stating that a shutdown would be “forced by Congressional Democrats.” All federal agency leadership was ordered to send a message to workers blaming the impending shutdown on Democratic lawmakers.
Hours before the shutdown, HUD’s deputy secretary Andrew Hughes wrote an email to employees with the subject line “Far Left Gov Shutdown Imminent.”
Automated reply messages from furloughed staff at the Small Business Administration also blame Senate Democrats for their absence.
“I am out of office for the foreseeable future because Senate Democrats voted to block a clean federal funding bill,” the out-of-office message reads in part.
Craig Holman, a government ethics expert with nonprofit consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, filed a Hatch Act complaint against HUD, which appeared to be the first federal agency to post an explicitly political shutdown message on its website.
He called the agency’s statement an “obvious” violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in most political activity.
“How on Earth does HUD think they can get away with this?” he said in a statement. “The answer is that the Trump administration has managed to neuter the ethics enforcement offices in the executive branch.”
The agencies responsible for enforcing the Hatch Act — including the Office of Special Counsel, the Office of Government Ethics and the Attorney General — “have all been taken over by Trump loyalists or those who are intimidated by Trump,” Holman said.
Federal agencies are adopting an “illegal, partisan tactic think they can get away with it because Trump has gutted any and all ethics oversight of the federal government,” according to Holman.
“Ethics officials — as lacking in power and status as they may be under Trump — must act immediately to prove them wrong,” he said. “The American people deserve better.”
Kathleen Clark, a professor of law at Washington University, said the administration is “acting lawlessly” in coordination with a Republican-controlled Congress that’s “afraid to stand up to him” and with the support of the Supreme Court’s conservative justices who “affirmatively encourage his lawlessness, admonishing lower court judges not to interfere” with the president’s “illegal acts.”
The Trump administration has turned “a government agency website into a partisan billboard,” according to Virginia Canter with advocacy group Democracy Defenders Fund, which also sent a complaint to the Government Accountability Office about the messages.
“It’s an abuse of power, a waste of taxpayer money, and appears to be a flat-out violation of the law,” she said Wednesday.
“A shutdown will cause stress for the public regardless of political affiliation,” according to nonprofit watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which filed several Hatch Act complaints during Trump’s first administration.
“Agency leadership’s job in this moment is to provide nonpartisan service to their constituents, not politicize the situation and blame political enemies,” the group said.
