Turning the government’s power to his own ends

He turned official government websites into partisan attack messages during the shutdown.

During the October 2025 shutdown, federal agency homepages, including the Justice Department and HUD, carried banners blaming the “Radical Left Democrat shutdown,” using official taxpayer-funded sites for partisan messaging the Hatch Act bars. A Republican who served as George W. Bush's chief ethics lawyer called it the most extreme partisan use of federal agencies he had seen. <span class='caveat'>Formal enforcement stalled because the office that handles it had been furloughed.</span>

SourcesThe partisan banners, GovExec · A Republican ethics lawyer, Spectrum

He turned official government websites into partisan attack messages during the shutdown.
More on this
His Homeland Security signed a $464 million no-bid contract for planes it said it urgently needed to deport people, then let them sit parked for months, turned three into luxury jets, and lent one to the FBI director.His DHS waived dozens of laws to bulldoze a border wall through Big Bend National Park, over a cease-and-desist from Texas’s Republican land commissioner and the objections of seven former park superintendents.He ordered the Navy to rip out the electromagnetic catapults on its newest carriers and go back to 1950s steam, at a cost of billions, just as China put the very same technology to sea.

← Back to the full record