The 2025 Government Shutdown, and a Very Trumpy Message on FOIA.gov
By Michael Kelman Portney
I. Welcome to the Ministry of Truth.gov
We begin in the most American of ways: with a website glitch that’s not a glitch at all. A digital slip of the tongue that says more than a thousand official press briefings ever could. Right now, at this very moment, if you visit the Freedom of Information Act’s official federal website—FOIA.gov—you will be greeted with a spectacularly inappropriate partisan jab:
“Democrats have shut down the government.”
Not Congress. Not "a budget impasse." Not "due to lack of appropriations."
No nuance. No context. Just five words soaked in bile, dripping with intent.
Let me repeat the setting: this isn’t a political campaign's website. It’s not Breitbart, not Fox, not some third-tier reactionary substack peddling bumper sticker outrage to angry boomers. It’s the Department of Justice's own portal for accessing federal records. The literal gateway to transparency. The front door to your constitutional right to know what your government is doing behind closed doors.
And that front door now has graffiti on it.
Spray-painted by a bitter partisan intern, apparently, and approved by a department that either didn’t notice—or didn’t care.
This isn’t just inappropriate.
It’s state-sponsored misinformation.
II. FOIA.gov: The Last Place You Should Find Blame-Politics
Here’s why this matters: FOIA.gov is supposed to be as neutral as a courtroom stenographer. It's not just another agency site. It’s a legal instrument. A living embodiment of the idea that governments derive their legitimacy not from divine right, but from transparency. That we, the people, are not peasants to be dictated to, but sovereigns to be informed.
And now, it’s just another echo chamber for partisan slop.
Whoever typed that line either didn’t know what FOIA is or didn’t care. And whoever approved it should be relieved of duty yesterday.
Because in case anyone forgot, the Freedom of Information Act exists to prevent exactly this kind of bullshit. It’s a direct check on the ability of those in power to control the narrative. And yet here we are: the gatekeeper has turned propagandist. The watchdog is growling on command.
III. What Does This Actually Say?
Let’s dissect the phrase “Democrats have shut down the government,” not as politics, but as rhetoric.
First, it’s grammatically passive-aggressive. There’s no context, no framing, no explanation of the legislative process. Just a five-word verdict.
“Democrats. Shut down. The government.”
It reads like a punchline from a Sean Hannity monologue that got copy-pasted into a DOJ CMS.
Second, it’s factually reductionist. Government shutdowns are the result of complex negotiations—or more often, failures of negotiation—between both parties. They happen when Congress can’t agree on how to fund the government. That includes House Republicans, Senate Democrats, the Executive Branch, and every staffer in between. Blaming one side without framing? That’s not informing the public. That’s throwing red meat to your team and pretending it's journalism.
Third, and most important, it weaponizes a nonpartisan federal service for political warfare. That’s a line that should never be crossed.
Imagine calling 911 and the operator says, “Sorry, Democrats broke the phone lines.”
Imagine trying to renew your passport and the website says, “Republicans defunded your vacation.”
It would be laughable if it weren’t so goddamn sinister.
IV. FOIA Is Sacred. Yes, Sacred.
Some things in government are supposed to be above the fray. FOIA is one of them. It's not sexy. It's not flashy. But it's one of the last lines of defense against authoritarian drift.
Think about it. FOIA is how we learned about:
COINTELPRO
Abu Ghraib
Water contamination in Flint
The FBI’s files on Martin Luther King Jr.
Drone strike memos
The Pentagon's UFO research
Without FOIA, a lot of what we “know” about our own country would still be buried in redacted files and forgotten archives. FOIA is the tool that lets the citizen pry open the black box. And now, the black box is talking back.
V. Bureaucratic Gaslighting: The Slippery Slope
If you want to know where a country is heading, don’t look at the speeches. Look at the forms. Look at the copy-paste boilerplate on public sites. Look at the footnotes nobody reads and the banners no one is supposed to question.
Because that’s where the rot begins. Quietly. Bureaucratically. Under the radar.
And once you normalize this kind of thing—a partisan message on a neutral site—you’ve opened the door to a thousand others.
Today, it’s a throwaway line on FOIA.gov.
Tomorrow, it’s manipulated wait times on Medicare.
Next week, it’s FBI hotlines only investigating “leftist” threats.
Next year, it’s public records scrubbed for “national unity.”
Don’t think it can’t happen. It already is. This is how it starts: with a line nobody questioned, posted by a clerk nobody elected, approved by a manager too cowardly or lazy to say no.
VI. Who Wrote It? Who Approved It?
Let’s ask the question no one’s asking:
Who the hell put that line there?
Was it a rogue staffer? A Trump-era holdover? A copywriter on a bender? An AI hallucination gone political?
Or worse: was it deliberate policy?
Because if it was, we’ve got a much bigger problem than bad copy. We’ve got weaponized bureaucracy.
This is the exact kind of thing people warned about in 2016, and again in 2020. That institutions built to be neutral could be slowly bent, reworded, repurposed. That the bureaucracy itself—the gears of the state—could be turned into a partisan machine.
Apparently, they were right.
And now it’s happening at FOIA.gov.
The fox isn't just guarding the henhouse. He's writing the menu.
VII. Why This Isn’t Just "An Error"
I already know what the apologists are going to say. “It was a mistake.” “It was temporary.” “The message will be updated soon.”
Wrong. This wasn’t a typo.
Typos don’t insert specific party names into federal announcements. Typos don’t blame Democrats in the middle of a shutdown. Typos look like "govenment" or "infomration." This was a conscious decision. It was typed, reviewed, and published.
And it stayed live long enough for screenshots to circulate and outrage to brew. Which means it passed at least one layer of review. And maybe that’s the most chilling part—because it tells you that at some level, someone thought this was okay.
And if they thought this was okay, what else are they approving?
VIII. A Thought Experiment
Imagine this happened under a Democratic administration.
Imagine FOIA.gov had a banner that read:
“Republicans have sabotaged government funding.”
Can you hear the outrage?
Can you feel the Fox News panels queuing up?
Can you imagine the hearings, the tweets, the calls for resignation?
But because it targets Democrats, it’ll likely get written off as an “internal miscommunication.” And that's the tell. That’s the smoking gun. Because if it's only bad when it targets your side, you don’t actually care about neutrality. You care about control.
IX. Institutional Capture by Incompetence
The scariest thing about this isn’t even the partisanship. It’s the incompetence.
It means no one is watching the door. That an institution as important as the DOJ can allow one of its public-facing arms to spew partisan bile with zero consequence. That even FOIA—the goddamn Freedom of Information Act—has no watchdog.
This isn’t just about abuse. It’s about neglect.
It’s about what happens when no one thinks clearly, no one says “stop,” and no one understands what these systems are actually for anymore. It’s about death by a thousand copywriters, one banner message at a time.
X. What Needs to Happen (And Won’t)
Let’s be crystal clear:
The line needs to be taken down. Immediately.
A public apology must be issued.
A full investigation into how it got there is warranted.
Whoever approved it should be publicly named and fired.
Congressional oversight should be activated.
And none of that will happen.
Because we live in the era of no consequences. Because every line of code and every public message is now a battlefield in the culture war. And because the people who are supposed to stop this kind of thing are either asleep, indifferent, or rooting for it.
XI. The Bigger Picture: Trust is Already Dead
This is the kind of story that breaks something fundamental. Not because it’s huge, but because it’s small and still allowed to happen.
We don’t trust government websites anymore.
We don’t trust news outlets.
We don’t trust watchdogs.
We don’t even trust watchdogs to watch the watchdogs.
And when the website designed to fight misinformation becomes a vector for it, you’ve entered collapse territory. Not dramatic collapse. Not a revolution. Just slow, relentless, drip-drip erosion of the civic contract.
XII. The Warning Label for the Future
Mark this moment. Screenshot it. Archive it. Because this is how future historians will mark the death of public neutrality.
They won’t point to some grand Supreme Court ruling or a violent insurrection. They’ll point to stuff like this. To a five-word message on a federal website. To bureaucratic graffiti with no author. To a system too bloated to self-correct and too cynical to even try.
And one day, when some future FOIA request comes back fully redacted, the person holding the blacked-out PDF will remember this banner.
And they’ll understand: the propaganda wasn’t just in the message.
It was in the silence that followed.
Misinformation doesn’t always come from the shadows.
Sometimes, it wears a badge and a .gov domain.
