By Nate Raymond
(Reuters) -A federal workers' union filed a lawsuit on Friday challenging the Trump administration's alteration of furloughed U.S. Department of Education employees' out-of-office email messages to include language blaming Democrats in the U.S. Senate for the government shutdown.
The American Federation of Government Employees in a lawsuit alleged the administration violated employees' free speech rights under the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment by co-opting their email correspondence
to force them to "recite partisan words that they would not have spoken otherwise."
The complaint filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., said the out-of-office email responses are crafted to appear as if the employees are speaking in the first person, suggesting the language should be ascribed to the furloughed workers.
The employees belong to a department that Republican President Donald Trump says should be dismantled. Some of the employees were already on administrative leave due to pending mass layoffs at the Education Department, the lawsuit said.
Others were furloughed after Congress failed to enact spending legislation to avert a government shutdown that began on Wednesday and is set to continue into next week. The Education Department had planned to furlough about 87% of its employees if a shutdown occurred, the complaint said.
The lawsuit said that after the shutdown began, many Education Department employees discovered that the language in the out-of-office messages they had set had been modified to blame Senate Democrats.
"Unfortunately, Democrat Senators are blocking passage of H.R. 5371 in the Senate which has led to a lapse in appropriations," the messages said, according to the complaint. "Due to the lapse in appropriations I am currently in furlough status. I will respond to emails once government functions resume.”
Skye Perryman, president of Democracy Forward, the liberal legal group representing the union, in a statement said, "Posting messages without consent to broadcast messages on behalf of a partisan agenda is a blatant violation of First Amendment rights."
An email by Reuters to the Education Department's press team generated an automatic reply that mirrored the message the lawsuit cited, similarly blaming "Democrat Senators" for the lapse in appropriations.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Leslie Adler)
