In a striking departure from long-standing norms, several federal agencies are publicly blaming congressional Democrats for the government shutdown.
A banner on the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s website currently reads, “The Radical Left in Congress shut down the government. HUD will use available resources to help Americans in need.”
Kedric Payne leads the ethics program at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization that advances democracy through law.
“It is extremely unusual and possibly unprecedented because there is no reason for an agency to get involved in such partisan statements to the public,” Payne said. “I worked previously in the federal government. We always had particular language that was ready for a shutdown, and never did it have any partisan nature to that.”
A message at the top of the Department of Justice website reads, “Democrats have shut down the government.”
Department of Health and Human Services employees received an email prior to the shutdown stating, “Unfortunately, Democrats are blocking this continuing resolution in the U.S. Senate due to unrelated policy demands.”
Payne said there needs to be an investigation to determine whether this is a violation of the Hatch Act, a federal law that prohibits government employees from engaging in political campaign activity.
“The larger problem is that it violates an ethics norm where agencies may perform the work of an administration, but they do it in a nonpartisan manner,” Payne said. “These statements are not from an individual. They’re from the agency, from the American government, and they are made in a way that divides the public based on partisan affiliation. And that is not a normal activity for a government agency.”
He said the language in the messages “was worded very carefully to try to” avoid violating the Hatch Act. The Campaign Legal Center will likely request documents under the Freedom of Information Act to understand what motivated this communication.
He said an investigation could reveal whether there was other activity behind the scenes that is political and partisan.
WTOP reached out to the White House for comment but has not heard back.
“The most disturbing part is that this could be the beginning, and not the end, of a trend where more agencies will have public statements on behalf of the agency, not a particular individual, that are partisan in nature and that seek to divide the public instead of serving the public,” Payne said.
Payne also said the Office of Government Ethics was stripped of its head during the first week of President Donald Trump’s administration, leaving no clear ethics enforcement mechanism to resolve what appears to be a violation of an ethics norm. He added there’s no reason to think these types of messages will stop.
“The ultimate consequence is that it makes a highly politically charged environment that we have now across this country even worse,” Payne said. “It’s extremely concerning, because this could be the beginning of something even bigger.”
