On Easter Sunday, US Department of Agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins sent out an email titled “He has risen!” to the entire agency. In the email, Rollins calls the story of Jesus Christ the “greatest story ever told, the foundation of our faith, and the abiding hope of all mankind.”
One USDA employee called the email “grotesque” and said the wording made them think it had been written by AI.
“This has never happened before,” says the employee, who, like others WIRED spoke to for this article, was granted anonymity due to fear of retaliation. “I have never gotten a message like this from anyone.” The employee says that this behavior would not even be normal for military chaplains, for whom faith is part of their work.
The email sparked an internal complaint to the Office of Special Counsel by USDA employee Ethan Roberts. In his complaint, Roberts, who is also the president of a local union for federal employees, alleged that the email “eroded the separation of church and state,” according to CNN.
“The secretary is within her rights to send a message to employees and the public on the Easter holiday. Just like secretaries of agriculture and presidents have in the past,” a USDA spokesperson told WIRED.
The USDA is not the only agency espousing overtly religious rhetoric: At the Department of Health and Human Services, the Small Business Administration, and the Department of Labor, federal employees have been alarmed to watch Christianity’s creep into the government since President Donald Trump’s return to office.
On February 7, 2025, Trump signed an executive order establishing the official White House Faith Office as well as faith offices across government agencies. The White House Faith Office is led by Paula White-Cain, a pastor and televangelist known for her controversial invocations throughout Trump’s various presidential campaigns.
Since then, faith offices have sprung up across agencies, and Christianity has started appearing in office life. A July 2025 memo from the Office of Personnel Management titled “Protecting Religious Expression in the Federal Workplace” permits federal employees to essentially proselytize to their colleagues, so long as trying to “persuade others of the correctness of their own religious views” doesn’t cross the line into harassment. The memo also permits workers to “encourage” their colleagues “to participate in religious expressions of faith, such as prayer.” In response to a request for comment, an OPM spokesperson referred WIRED to the July 2025 memo.
At the Department of Labor, Kenneth Wolfe, the director of the agency’s faith center, hosts monthly worship services. A DOL employee, who spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, says that these prayer services are “very abnormal.”
“Generally, people who are working for the government understand that their job is to work on behalf of all Americans,” they say. “And this is something very different. This is very explicitly Christian, and even within the realm of Christianity, a very narrow representation of that.”
On January 12, Alveda King, the niece of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., a former state representative from Georgia, and a senior adviser on faith and community outreach at the USDA, told DOL employees during a monthly worship service, “We have different denominations, different faiths, and some have no faith—and those are the ones I would be more concerned about.”
