Defending Nonpartisanship in the Civil Service (American Federation of Government Employees v. U.S. Department of Education)

When U.S. Department of Education (DOE) employees were told to stop working during the 2025 government shutdown, they set out-of-office messages to inform anyone who contacted them via email that they would not be able to respond during the duration of the shutdown. Without the employees’ knowledge or consent, leadership at DOE changed employees’ individual out-of-office messages to include partisan talking points criticizing the Trump administration’s political opponents.

These DOE employees objected to the co-opting of their individual email accounts for the purposes of partisan politics. The employees’ union, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), represented by Public Citizen and Democracy Forward, sued DOE to restore the email messages to their original, nonpartisan form.

Congress requires government employees to act in a nonpartisan manner while on the job. For example, in 1939, Congress passed the Hatch Act to prohibit federal employees from engaging in certain partisan political activities during their public service. CLC has filed multiple complaints against Trump administration officials for violations of the Hatch Act in Trump’s first term. Laws like the Hatch Act help the government to work effectively and bolster public trust in institutions by ensuring that civil servants are hired based on merit and not on partisan favors.

Civil servants carry out the everyday tasks of government. These include actions like processing Social Security payments, making sure our nation’s airports are safe and measuring air and water pollution. The nuts-and-bolts of governing done by civil servants prioritizes service to all the American people, not advancing a partisan agenda.  

CLC filed an amicus brief explaining the importance of nonpartisanship in the civil service. CLC’s brief explains that the rules banning partisan activity on the job came into existence because a corrupt “spoils” system had emerged, where the only way to get a government job was to perform political favors for powerful officials.  

Norms of nonpartisanship in the civil service are decades old. However, the Trump administration has repeatedly ignored the basic idea that official government resources should not be aimed at affecting the outcome of partisan elections. The DOE’s recent action politicizing its employees’ official emails without their consent erodes this important cornerstone of nonpartisanship.

In our brief, CLC argues that the Hatch Act and related laws establish that nonpartisanship is a cornerstone of the civil service, and, as such, partisan politics cannot be a part of a civil servant’s official duties. And forcing a civil servant to engage in political speech against their will violates the civil servant’s right to engage in the First Amendment speech of their choosing in their private life. Therefore, CLC argues that the Trump administration’s actions violated the employees’ First Amendment rights to free speech.

CLC urges the court to require the Trump administration to remove these partisan out-of-office messages from the accounts of Department of Education employees.