ED Put Political Out-of-Office Reply on Staff Emails

"Wednesday morning, as the government shutdown began, chief officers at the Department of Education distributed a standard out-of-the-office statement to all furloughed staff members and instructed them to copy and paste it into their email. So that's what they did. But just hours later, those same nonpartisan staffers began to hear that the message they'd pasted into their email account was not the message being received by the public."

"On Wednesday evening, my supervisor reached out to me on my personal equipment and said, 'You're going to want to log in and change your out-of-office status,' one department staffer told Inside Higher Ed on the condition of anonymity out of fear of losing her job. When she followed her supervisor's direction and logged in, the automatic message she saw was not the one she had saved earlier that morning."

"Rather than the original note, which had said, 'There is a temporary shutdown ... due to a lapse in appropriations,' the new message said, 'Unfortunately, Democrat Senators are blocking passage of [a bill] ... which has led to a lapse in appropriations.' This is one of the more than 10 emails Inside Higher Ed received as automatic responses including the same political message. Although Keast was appointed by Trump, most of the staffers we contacted were not."

Chief officers at the Department of Education instructed furloughed staff to copy a standard out-of-office message into their email at the start of a government shutdown. Hours later staff discovered that the automatic replies being sent publicly had been internally changed to a politically charged message blaming Democratic senators for the lapse in appropriations. A supervisor directed a staffer to log in, revealing the altered message, and more than ten identical automatic responses were reported. Department press contacts did not respond to inquiries, and most affected staff were nonpartisan career employees.

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