Bad enough that planes are delayed due to the government shutdown. Now, thousands of stranded passengers have to watch Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem blame Democrats in a video where she says:
“It is T.S.A.’s top priority to make sure that you have the most pleasant and efficient airport experience as possible while we keep you safe. However, Democrats in Congress refuse to fund the federal government, and because of this many of our operations are impacted and most of our T.S.A. employees are working without pay.”
It’s the same across much of the shuttered federal government.
If your farm is losing global customers because other nations are retaliating for Trump’s tariffs and you go to the Department of Agriculture’s website to see if you have any recourse, you now read that the government is closed “due to the Radical Left Democrat shutdown.”
If you try to get through to the Small Business Administration to check on your SBA loan, you get an automated phone message: “I am out of office for the foreseeable future because Senate Democrats voted to block a clean federal funding bill (H.R. 5371) leading to a government shutdown that is preventing the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) from serving America’s 36 million small businesses.”
If you check the Department of Justice’s website, you get a banner saying, “Democrats have shut down the government.”
When I served in the federal government — once in a Republican administration, then in two Democratic ones — I was prohibited from making any public comment or taking any action that might be considered “partisan.”
I was told I couldn’t even sign a letter asking the residents of my home state (then Massachusetts) to be sure to vote in an upcoming federal election.
At that time I was working in Gerald Ford’s Justice Department. The letterhead was from the Justice Department, and several of us from Massachusetts were prepared to sign on.
“You can’t do that,” the departmental lawyer said. “It violates the Hatch Act, which bars federal executive branch employees from partisan activities.”
“But this letter isn’t partisan,” I recall arguing. “It just urges people to vote.”
“You’re missing the point,” the lawyer responded. “It’s coming from you as an employee of the Justice Department in a Republican administration, so it could be seen as a Republican endorsement.”
And that was the end of that.
The Hatch Act was passed in 1939. Its purpose was to ensure federal programs were administered in a nonpartisan way and to protect federal employees from any political coercion on the job.
The Hatch Act is still the law. As is the Anti-Lobbying Act of 1919, which prohibits the use of appropriated funds for activities designed to “support or defeat legislation pending before Congress.”
So what’s with all the government employees in the Trump administration putting out partisan propaganda during the shutdown?
Can Kristi Noem tell airport passengers that Democrats are to blame for the shutdown? Can the secretary of agriculture or the director of the Small Business Administration or the attorney general announce on department webpages and automated responses that the shutdown is occurring because Democrats have refused to fund the federal government?
The answer in all these cases is no. These statements and messages violate the legal obligations of agency employees to “provide nonpartisan service to their constituents.” All involve Trump or his appointees requiring nonpartisan civil servants to engage in highly partisan actions.
According to the law, penalties for violating the Hatch Act can result in removal from federal office and civil penalties of up to $1,000.
But as with so much in Trump world, illegal actions have no consequence. There’s no mechanism for holding anyone accountable.
A number of Hatch Act complaints have been filed against Cabinet secretaries and agencies posting partisan messages. But Hatch Act violations are investigated by the Office of Special Counsel in the White House, so they’re ending up in the circular file.
The good news is that some administrators at the ground level — literally — are enforcing the Hatch Act on their own.
Many airport authorities are simply refusing to show Noem’s video.
Kara Hansen, a spokeswoman for the Port of Portland in Oregon, explained in a statement that the port wouldn’t show it because the video violated the Hatch Act.
Ken Jenkins, the Westchester County, N.Y., executive who refused to show the video at the White Plains airport, said the video is “inappropriate, unacceptable, and inconsistent with the values we expect from our nation’s top public officials.”
Exactly.
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/