Warren, Senate Dems Press Government Accountability Office to Investigate Trump Administration’s Partisan Government Shutdown Messaging

Warren, Senate Dems Press Government Accountability Office to Investigate Trump Administration's Partisan Government Shutdown Messaging

Political messages may have violated federal appropriations law

Text of Letter (PDF)

Washington, D.C. - U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.), Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Andy Kim (D-N.J.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Tina Smith (D-Minn.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), and Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.) pressed the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to open an investigation to determine whether the Trump administration violated federal appropriations law by publishing partisan messages on official government websites and directing employees to post political out-of-office messages.

The Trump administration started to incorporate partisan - possibly illegal - messaging into official federal agency websites ahead of and during the government shutdown. Some agencies' announcements appeared to include nothing more than partisan messaging and lacked a connection to official business. One message on the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) website, for example, blamed "the Radical Left" for the shutdown.

HUD was not the only agency to post such messages online; the Department of Agriculture (Ag), the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Department of Treasury, the Small Business Association (SBA), and others included similar shutdown language on their websites. The Department of Homeland Security's Transportation Security Administration (TSA) began playing videos with partisan messaging about the shutdown for passengers in airport security lines.

"(These) announcements appeared to include nothing more than partisan messaging and lacked a connection to official business," wrote the senators.

Some agencies reportedly also directed furloughed employees to post partisan messages in their out-of-office email responses. The Department of Labor reportedly "sent a message to all employees…suggesting a potential out-of-office notification" that accused Democrats of shutting down the government. Some emails were even sent without employees' knowledge, like at the Department of Education, where some workers "had out of office messages blaming Democrats for the government shutdown" that were "automatically sent from their email accounts without their consent."

Federal law prohibits the executive branch from using federal funds "for publicity or propaganda purposes," including for purely partisan materials. The law also prohibits agencies from using federal funding directly or indirectly, to generate publicity designed to influence Congress in supporting or opposing legislation or appropriations. When agencies violate restrictions on the use of appropriated funds for publicity or propaganda, GAO usually finds that those actions also violate the Antideficiency Act.

"To help us better understand recent actions taken at federal agencies leading up to and during the government shutdown…we ask GAO to conduct an investigation," concluded the senators.

The senators asked that GAO investigate any and all processes followed to make the determination to issue partisan public communications, as well as directives by federal agency leadership to post partisan messages, and that GAO make a determination about whether these agencies' communications violated federal law.

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