John, it shouldn’t be radical to expect our government to follow basic ethics rules - under any Administration.

But moments after Trump shut down the government, agencies like the Center for Disease Control, Department of Housing and Urban Development, and even the Food and Drug Administration put up huge red banners on their websites, parroting Trump’s message of blaming Democrats. [1]

And that’s not just wrong – it may be illegal. The Hatch Act, and laws like it, ban the use of official agency channels for partisan politics.

Now, you’re seeing in real time why those protections matter so much.

We turn to government websites for health guidance, travel safety guidelines, or Social Security updates, not campaign ads. And we expect government officials to use government resources to serve the public, not to push biased propaganda. The American people deserve a president focused on improving their lives, not one who turns government communications into a partisan campaign megaphone.

Common Cause isn’t going to stand for this – so our legal team stayed up all night reviewing agency websites, documenting evidence of multiple violations at 18 agencies of laws like the Hatch Act, the Anti-Deficiency Act, and the Anti-Lobbying Act. Now today we are officially asking for investigations into each one, totaling 54 complaints we've now filed.

54 separate complaints is an absurd amount of paperwork…and it shows our nation’s systems aren’t designed to account for this level coordinated, systemic abuse of public office and resources.

That’s why we’re calling for a comprehensive overhaul of the federal ethics enforcement system, including the establishment of a single, robust, and independent government watchdog with jurisdiction over the entire executive branch.

We did this because someone needs to hold the Trump Administration accountable for hijacking government communication channels and wasting our public resources for narrow partisan purposes.

The simple fact is, our government’s built-in ethics safeguards are completely outmatched by Donald Trump’s coordinated and collective abuse of public office.

You see, when Trump or his cronies hijack agency websites to blame Democrats for the shutdown, it’s no one-off mistake. It’s a deliberate and calculated strategy to flood the zone, overwhelm advocates like Common Cause, and hope we’ll be too distracted by everything else he’s broken in our country to respond.

So, if we don’t act, Trump gets to keep abusing power, strongarming public servants into playing shutdown politics, and robbing us all of our right to a government we can trust.

Here’s the solution: we need real, independent ethics enforcement – empowered to take immediate action whenever officials break the law flagrantly and on a widespread scale.

And to get us there, Common Cause is ready and willing to fight for all of us. Americans are fed up and ready for a change… which is why we recently launched our Anti-Corruption & Accountability program so we can be the watchdogs you deserve.

So if you want to see us keep taking actions like this one – and build the people-powered movement required to deliver ethics safeguards that can stand up to Trump 2.0 – can you help power this work with a Founding Contribution today?

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Thanks for all you do,

The team at Common Cause

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/02/government-shutdown-emails-blaming-democrats