At one point, something called the Hatch Act purported to bar federal employees from using their taxpayer-funded jobs to boost political candidates or private companies. It was never very toothy (few violators face discipline above and beyond a warning letter), but leave it to Team Trump to brush it aside completely. If White House "counselor" Kellyanne Conway is going to pop in front of the cameras to blast Trump's 2020 challengers or then-U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley is going to use her Twitter feed to boost a Trump-favored South Carolina congressman, it sends a clear signal that this law, too, is now optional.
Digital strategy chief Dan Scavino, top press aide Jessica Ditto, former media affairs chief Helen Aguirre Ferré, ex-deputy press secretary Raj Shah and Jacob Wood, the No. 2 communications officer at the Office of Management and Budget, also made the list, as did Trump’s executive assistant, Madeleine Westerhout — all for tweets.
The office also concluded that Michael O’Rielly, a Federal Communications Commission commissioner, violated the Hatch Act when he advocated for Trump during a 2018 speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference.
You can't make the case that these are minor gaffes when government employees are popping over to hard-right "political action" conferences to make their statements. But because the transgressions are so public and the law is toothless, requiring that the White House itself mete out punishments if it finds punishments are warranted (tip: it has not), the public effect is a seeming erasure of the law from the books. Is it illegal to use your taxpayer-paid position to advocate for Dear Leader's allied political candidates? Of course! And that and five bucks will get you a cup of coffee, buddy.
This new erosion of law, however, is going to continue to be mostly ignored.
That is just the way it is: The staff of the sitting president is currently arguing, this week, that Congress has no oversight powers at all over the presidency—not even if he has personally committed crimes, not to investigate publicized financial malfeasance or the use of presidential powers to thwart investigation of his allies or anything else.
And we are many weeks into a constitutional crisis that will determine whether any laws, at all, can constrain a president's powers if his House and Senate allies endorse the law-breaking themselves. Kellyanne Conway popping off with another rant against a Trump-opposing candidate is largely irrelevant in that context, not when "is the president allowed to block federal investigators and Congress alike from investigating crimes committed by allies" is the more dire question of the day.
We should stuff it in a drawer for later, though. If something arises to take the place of the now-decayed Republican syndicate, and if in some future administration it has been re-established that the Executive branch cannot violate whatever laws they might like in an attempt to gain and keep personal and party power, we may dust it off again. But it won't be soon.