The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) provided the following template language to establish employees’ out-of-office notifications.
“Furloughed Employees: Thank you for contacting me. 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,” the text read.
However, multiple furloughed employees at the Department of Education report their out-of-office replies were automatically reset to mimic the language above – without their permission.
“They changed our out-of-office message… [They] did it after everyone left,” one department of education staffer told ABC News. “[I’m] so pissed,” they said.
This definitely isn’t the part of the story that matters, but I hate that they use the term “Democrat Senators.” They’re Democratic senators FFS. Do we call Republican senators Republic Senators? No, no we don’t.
It’s on purpose
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrat_Party_(epithet)
Yeah exactly, which is why it showing up in these out of office replies is that much worse. The Hatch Act is meaningless.
The Hatch Act is still law, it is just that the current administration is not enforcing it against their team. They are betting that there will never be someone in charge of the DOJ who would start prosecuting over that.
If we ever get another administration, they should clean house to remove those who ignored their oaths. Federal employees have sworn not to violate the Hatch Act and should be prosecuted to remove the infection from our government. As a former federal employee, I do not appreciate these roles becoming political in any way.
The only way that can work is if the GOP gets over it’s martyr complex and recognizes that this politization is wrong and needs to be punished. Otherwise they will just complain that the Democrats are exiling Republicans due to their political stances, and proceed to purge everyone again when they take over, pardoning and installing all the lawbreakers again.
Yeah, unfortunately I recognize that… The difference, not that it really makes one in the current climate, is that one side would have actually broken a long-standing law while the other would not. Hopefully if that cycle is repeated enough people would see who the liars are.
It probably doesn’t matter, though…
It would be great if people could realize this applies to Democrat as an adjective and not Democrat as a noun. The Democrats literally use the word in their youth organizations (Young Democrats of America and High School Democrats of America), and I’ve seen people on the fediverse act like it’s a slur. If people could learn how sentence structure works before going off on someone for using Democrat as a noun that would be great.
“You see? The Radical Left are the real (grammar) Nazis!”
But that’s because Republican is both the noun and the adjective, unlike Democrat and Democratic. We don’t call democratic senators democracy senators, which would be the equivalent of republic senators.
Technically we shouldn’t even call them republican senators. Grammatically, the correct term should be pack of nazis.
You are 100% right that the correct term is actually Pack of Nazis.
Nazi Pedophiles
I know, it’s so irritating. Which of course is just what they want. I always thought it just made them sound stupid, but they are totally fine with sounding stupid–they’re even proud of sounding stupid because they’re anti-intellectual, anti-education, anti-science. So the last thing they want is to sound “educated”.
But I think at this point they’ve overused it so much for so long that it’s lost its slur impact. By now a whole generation or two has grown up hearing it over and over so it probably just sounds normal to them. They probably just think that’s the actual name of the party.
Maybe we should
Republicants
Repulsicans
Reptillians
No we call them “fascist pedophile-enabling sniveling ghouls”. There are maybe a handful that occasionally are just humans who happen to have a different perspective on how a country should be run, but like 5 tops in all of government.