The Trump administration’s brazen violations of the Hatch Act are highlighting how the enforcement of laws has become a partisan exercise under this president.
In the midst of the government shutdown, President Donald Trump’s administration has taken to using government agency websites to make explicit partisan attacks against his Democratic opponents.
“Democrats have shut down the government. Department of Justice websites are not currently regularly updated,” reads a banner across the top of the Justice Department’s website.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development website opens to a page that says, “The Radical Left in Congress shut down the government,” while the Agriculture Department website now 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.”
All of these are straightforward violations of the 1939 Hatch Act, which bans federal employees from engaging in political activities, according to a recent complaint filed by the advocacy group Public Citizen.
The Hatch Act has a few goals, per the United States Office of Special Counsel: “The law’s purposes are to ensure that federal programs are administered in a nonpartisan fashion, to protect federal employees from political coercion in the workplace, and to ensure that federal employees are advanced based on merit and not based on political affiliation.”
The issue, as explained by Craig Holman, who filed multiple Hatch Act complaints against members of the administration on behalf of Public Citizen, is that the law doesn’t enforce itself.
“The problem is enforcement of the Hatch Act — that’s up to the Office of Special Counsel. Well, Trump has basically captured almost all the ethics enforcement agencies within the executive branch. Pam Bondi, a total Trump loyalist, has taken over the Attorney General’s Office and the Justice Department. Kash Patel has taken over the FBI. Trump has also taken over the Office of Government Ethics,” Holman explained.
Holman went on to note that Trump has “fired inspector generals who have shown any kind of independence to the Trump administration.”
“So I’m left with the Office of Special Counsel,” Holman said, which is also now led by a Trump appointee.
In response to a request for comment from Salon, the Department of Housing and Urban Development said: “The Radical Left has shut down the government,” and that it was unable to respond at this time.
The Agriculture Department also responded with an apparent Hatch Act violation, saying: “Due to staff furloughs resulting from the Radical Left Democrat shutdown, the typical monitoring of this press inbox may be impacted.”
The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment.
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Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., and Rep. Robert Scott, D-Va., have demanded that DOJ investigate the Trump administration over these responses, citing the constitutional prohibition against compelled speech.
“Under the First Amendment, the Executive Branch cannot compel speech any more than it can censor it. Yet Trump Administration officials have commandeered the email accounts of thousands of nonpartisan, career civil servants without their consent or knowledge to disseminate MAGA’s partisan and polemical talking points in their names. This is not only unlawfully compelled speech but potentially a federal criminal felony,” the representatives wrote.
Trump nominated Paul Ingrassia to serve as the head of the Office of Special Counsel in the spring. But that nomination was pulled from consideration in the Senate after Ingrassia’s association with neo-Nazis and history of denigrating federal workers was exposed.
According to Holman, the office has already told him that the shutdown has impacted their work. In Holman’s assessment, “they’re using the shutdown basically to just not do their job.”
“This way they don’t actually have to say no to me, but at the same time they’re not, it looks like they’re not going to investigate,” Holman said.
Holman added that he intended to bring his eleven complaints to the Office of Government Ethics. But, he noted, Trump has also captured that office; even if one of these offices sought an enforcement action, Trump could fire them.
“What my biggest hope at this point is, by going public, I can essentially embarrass the Office of Special Counsel into doing its job,” he said.
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Norm Ornstein, a political scientist at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, told Salon that the Trump administration’s shutdown messages are a blatant violation of the law.
“There is a constant move to go as far over any line that they can, and if there is not an appropriate and vigorous response, doubling down and tripling down,” Ornstein said. “This is just the beginning, I suspect, of an all-out use of every instrument of the executive branch and the federal government, including law enforcement organizations, to attack the Democratic Party, to undermine free elections [and] to turn the government into a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Party.”
Ornstein added that the Supreme Court has enabled Trump in his power grab and that any attempt to bring accountability or the rule of law back to the executive branch would have to start with reform of the court.
“The larger problem is that altering norms, once they’ve been shattered and replaced by others, is even harder than coming up with new laws,” Ornstein said.
