Government Workers Say Their Out-of-Office Replies Were Forcibly Changed to Blame Democrats for Shutdown

On Wednesday, the first day of the US government shutdown, employees at the Department of Education (DOE) set their automatic out-of-office email responses to inform recipients that they would be unable to respond until after the shutdown. Hours later, many DOE employees realized their response message had been altered to contain partisan language without their consent. The automatic reply now blamed Senate Democrats for the entire shutdown.

It’s not clear who made the change to email accounts, which…