Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) on Thursday defended the Trump administration for using official agency websites to politicize the government shutdown, saying the departments are just stating an “objective truth” about who bears the blame for the budget impasse.
A number of departments — including State, Justice and Housing and Urban Development (HUD) — have posted messages on their homepages saying Democrats bear the sole responsibility for the stalemate.
Critics have charged that those messages are in direct violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits the use of taxpayer funds to advance partisan political goals — a charge Johnson rejected out of hand.
Asked specifically about HUD’s website, which says “the radical left in Congress shut down the government,” the Speaker said there’s no denying the veracity of that message, since almost every Democrat in both chambers voted against the Republicans’ short-term spending bill to keep the government open.
“What the HUD website says is the objective truth,” Johnson told reporters in the Capitol. “There are 44 Democrats in the Senate — and by the way, every Democrat in the House, except one, who voted to shut the government down — they are the ones that made that decision.”
Democrats have a decidedly different view, saying Republicans are to blame for the shutdown because they crafted a spending bill without any Democratic input, then demanded that Democrats support it.
Joined by government watchdog groups, Democrats say the move to use official agency resources to attack Democrats is a clear violation of the ban on using taxpayer funds for partisan political purposes.
“The first thing that I wanted to know was: How could this not be a violation of the Hatch Act in some way,” Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) told CNN.
Public Citizen, a non-partisan watchdog group, has filed a formal complaint against HUD with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, which gauges potential Hatch Act violations.
“This is such an obvious violation of the Hatch Act that it raises the question: ‘How on Earth does HUD think they can get away with this?’” said Craig Holman, a government ethics expert at Public Citizen.
The finger pointing came as Trump and top administration officials are leaning on the shutdown to make aggressive moves to fire federal workers and slash federal programs. Russ Vought, the head of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), is leading that charge, announcing Wednesday that the administration will freeze or cancel major projects already approved and funded by Congress — virtually all of them targeting states led by Democrats.
Trump has done little to disguise the partisan nature of his moves to curtail government functions during the shutdown. On Thursday, he said he will soon meet with Vought to decide which “Democratic Agencies” will be cut — “and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent.”
“I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity,” he posted on his Truth Social account.
Johnson defended those partisan moves, saying Trump was empowered to make such decisions when voters gave him the White House last November.
“The White House, the executive branch, take no pleasure in this. But when they are tasked with determining what their priorities are, obviously they’re going to follow their principles and priorities and not the other team,” Johnson said.
“That’s the results of an election that everyone voted in.”
