A federal judge has ruled that the Department of Education violated the First Amendment when the agency replaced employees’ personalized out-of-office e-mail messages with a partisan autoreply blaming Democrats for a government shutdown.
U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper issued the decision after a lawsuit brought by the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE). “When government employees enter public service, they do not sign away their First Amendment rights,” Cooper wrote. “They certainly do not sign up to be a billboard for any given administration’s partisan views.”
Cooper ordered the department to restore union members’ personalized out-of-office messages immediately. If the department could not restore those individual notices, the judge said, it must remove the partisan language from all employees’ accounts — union members and nonmembers alike.
Court filings say Education Department staff were told to create out-of-office messages for their government e-mail accounts to use while furloughed during a lapse in appropriations. The department provided boilerplate language employees could adapt that simply stated the office could not respond because appropriations had lapsed and that responses would resume once funding was enacted.
On the first day of the shutdown, however, the department’s deputy chief of staff for operations is accused of overriding employees’ personal messages and inserting a standardized autoreply that read in part:
“On September 19, 2025, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 5371, a clean continuing resolution. Unfortunately, Democrat Senators are blocking passage of H.R. 5371 in the Senate which has led to a lapse in appropriations. Due to the lapse in appropriations I am currently in furlough status. I will respond to emails once government functions resume.”
Multiple employees told reporters they did not write that message and were not informed it would replace the out-of-office notices they had prepared.
At the time, Madi Biedermann, deputy assistant secretary for communications, defended the message, saying it reminded those who contacted department employees that “we cannot respond because Senate Democrats are refusing to vote for a clean CR and fund the government. Where’s the lie?”
Judge Cooper criticized the department for “turning its own workforce into political spokespeople through their official email accounts,” saying the agency “overplayed its hand.” He emphasized that nonpartisanship is a core principle of the federal civil service and pointed to the Hatch Act, the 1939 law designed to shield federal employees and programs from partisan political pressure.
AFGE Local 252 President Rachel Gittleman said the move was a clear First Amendment violation and part of a broader pattern of threats, harassment and demoralization of Education Department workers. The department did not provide a comment in response to requests about Cooper’s ruling.