Trump Administration Under fire for Editing Staff Emails

By: Alvin H. Green IV

A court has ruled the Trump administration violated the First Amendment Rights of federal workers by manually editing their personal emails to blame the longest Government Shutdown in history on Democrats in explicitly partisan terms. This happened while the employees were ‘furloughed’ or temporarily out of office due to economic conditions.

The lawsuit itself was brought on by the AFGE (American Federation of Government Employees). They are a union that represents more than 820,000 workers in the federal government, around 2,000 of which work at the Department of Education. AFGE National President Everett Kelley called the email editing an "unprecedented violation of the First Amendment.” 

The AFGE’s main argument of AFGE v. Trump is the idea that Government employees should not be forced to advertise or subscribe to the sometimes opposing, partisan, and radical views of their employers. The Trump team argued that the editing was completely within the Presidency's right under the Constitution.

The District Judge who presided over the case was Christopher Cooper, who proceeded to rule in favor of the AFGE, saying the administration could no longer modify the emails of anyone under the AFGE umbrella. 

Judge Cooper went on to write that “Nonpartisanship is the bedrock of the federal civil service; it ensures that career government employees serve the public, not the politicians.”

“I was genuinely, viscerally [upset] when I heard this story,” said Asase Ye Shabazz, a first-year English major from Virginia. “Honestly, the fact that there are systems in place where bosses can read and edit an employee’s private emails is just awful.”

The AFGE and their allies have filed dozens more lawsuits against Trump and his team for allegedly making multiple attempts to replace civil servants with political loyalists throughout his second term, using tools like mass layoffs, outlawing collective bargaining rights, and the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency. Trump has lost almost all of them, although multiple are still ongoing.

You can read the full AFGE ruling here, and you can see the full list of Trump’s Second Term lawsuits here.