NASA employee suspended for political blogging

Source: ComputerWorld

May 28, 2008 (Computerworld) WASHINGTON -- Any employee can get in trouble for personal blogging on company time, but U.S. government workers, as one NASA employee has discovered, can get into a special kind of legal trouble if they also write about politics. They risk violating a 1939 law called the Hatch Act, which requires federal employees to keep their jobs and political activities separate.

A National Aeronautics and Space Administration employee was suspended for 180 days for "numerous" blog posts about politics, sending "partisan e-mails" and soliciting for political contributions, according to an announcement last week by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC). The employee wasn't identified.

The intent of the Hatch Act is to prohibit "the use of the mechanism of government from influencing the outcome of an election," said James Mitchell, an OSC spokesman. If a person is seeking money for candidates on company time and on company equipment, "that person might as well have been soliciting within the office," he said.

The suspension was the result of agreement reached with NASA by the special counsel. The employee, whose suspension began March 30, could have been fired from his job.



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and all executive branch agencies for eight years--non-partisan, objective, even-handed public service?!!!?

It's hard to know whether to laugh or cry.

The OSC ought to be horsewhipped for this. The hypocrisy is truly mind-boggling.

I doubt anyone in the executive branch was ever suspended for posting to freerepublic