Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox Get our free Inside Washington email Get our free Inside Washington email Email * SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Earlier this week, the White House budget office sent out email templates to furloughed workers, encouraging their out-of-office reply messages to blame “Democrat Senators” for a lapse in funding that resulted in their unpaid leave. “They changed our out-of-office message… [They] did it after everyone left,” one Department of Education employee told ABC News. The messages follow a wave of partisan attacks on government websites explicitly blaming Democratic officials and the “radical left” for the federal shutdown. Democratic officials have also rejected Republican attempts to blame them for mass layoffs and furloughs of federal employees, arguing that the administration is using the shutdown crisis as a pretext to slash budgets and fire workers.