Education Department out-of-office emails violated First Amendment : NPR

A federal judge has ruled that the Trump administration violated the First Amendment rights of Department of Education employees when it replaced their personalized out-of-office email notifications with partisan language blaming Democrats for the government shutdown.

“When government employees enter public service, they do not waive their First Amendment rights,” U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper wrote in his decision on Friday, “and they certainly don’t intend to become a billboard for any administration’s partisan views.”

The lawsuit was filed by the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE).

“This ridiculous ploy by the Trump administration was a clear violation of the First Amendment rights of Department of Education workers,” Rachel Gittleman, president of AFGE Local 252, which represents many Department of Education workers, said in a statement. She added that this is “one of the many ways in which department leadership has threatened, harassed and demoralized these hardworking public servants over the past 10 months.”

Cooper ordered the department to immediately restore personal electronic out-of-office notices to union members. If that couldn't be done, he warned, the department would have to remove partisan language from the accounts of all employees, whether they were union members or not.

Ahead of the government shutdown, Department of Education employees were ordered to create an out-of-office message for their government email accounts to be used while employees are on leave, according to court records. The department even gave employees boilerplate language they could adapt that simply read:

“We are unable to respond to your request due to the cessation of appropriations for the Ministry of Education. We will respond to your request when the allocation is accepted. Thank you”.

But on the very first day of closure, the deputy chief of staff of the department for operational work ignored personal messages from employees and replaced them with this partisan auto-reply:

“Thank you for contacting me. On September 19, 2025, the House passed H.R. 5371, a clean continuing resolution. Unfortunately, Democratic Senators are blocking passage of H.R. 5371 in the Senate, resulting in the appropriations stalling. Due to the termination of appropriations, I am currently on leave. I will respond to emails as soon as government functions resume.”

Although the message was written in the first person, several employees told NPR they didn't write it, and they weren't told it would replace the out-of-office messages they wrote.

At the time, Madi Biedermann, deputy assistant secretary for public affairs, said in a statement to NPR: “This email reminds those reaching out to Department of Education staff that we cannot respond because Senate Democrats refuse to vote for a clean CR and fund the government.” Where is the lie?

In his decision, Cooper criticized the department for “turning its employees into political representatives through their official email accounts. The department may have added insult to injury, but it also overreached itself.”

The department did not respond to NPR's request for comment on the decision.

“Nonpartisanship is the foundation of the federal civil service system,” Cooper wrote, a principle that Congress enshrined in the Hatch Act.

This law, passed in 1939, was intended to protect government employees from political pressure and, according to United States Office of the Special Counsel“to ensure impartial administration of federal programs.”