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The White House website has been updated to blame the government shutdown that began Wednesday on Democrats. The official White House homepage was topped on Wednesday by a red, scrolling banner with the all-caps message “DEMOCRAT SHUTDOWN: DEMOCRATS’ [sic] IN THEIR OWN WORDS” along a countdown showing how long the shutdown has been going on. Users who clicked through were taken to a landing page with a livestreamed video of clips of Democratic lawmakers criticizing past shutdowns, integrating partisan messaging into its design. [Screenshot: WhiteHouse.gov] With a news ticker, countdown clock, and clips of politicians speaking on Capitol Hill, this is web design inspired by one of President Donald Trump’s favorite pastimes: cable news. It’s just one way the Trump administration is hoping to shift blame about the shutdown away from Republicans, who control the White House and both chambers of Congress, and who a plurality of Americans think deserve the blame. An NPR/PBS News/Marist poll released Tuesday found 38% of respondents blame Republicans for a shutdown, 31% blame both parties, 27% blame Democrats, and 4% blame neither. A screenshot taken the afternoon of Wednesday, October 1st 2025. Federal blame game appears in several contexts Some federal agencies are finding ways to blame Democrats for the shutdown through official channels, too. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) website added a pop-up and landing page messaging that says “The Radical Left in Congress shut down the government. HUD will use available resources to help Americans in need” while the State Department’s website says “Due to the Democrat-led shutdown, website updates will be limited until full operations resume.” At the Small Business Administration (SBA), employees received language for a suggested out-of-office email that blamed Democrats, according to Wired. “I am out of office for the foreseeable future because Senate Democrats voted to block a clean federal spending bill (HR 5371), leading to a government shutdown that is preventing the US Small Business Administration from serving Americas 36 million small businesses. Every day that Senate Democrats continue [to] oppose a clean funding bill, they are stopping an estimated 320 small businesses from accessing $170 million in SBA-guaranteed funding,” the suggested email language read. Potential legal implications of partisan messaging Richard Painter, former White House ethics lawyer for former President George W. Bush and a University of Minnesota professor of corporate law, says the White House website update isn’t a clear-cut violation of the Hatch Act, which restricts the political activities of federal employees, “unless the official statement mentions candidates, elections or campaign slogans,” though he says it may violate rules about lobbying. “I do think, however, this is probably part of a coordinated executive branch campaign to lobby Congress, and thus this in combination with the agency web pages and emails probably violates statutory restrictions on use of taxpayer money to lobby Congress,” Painter tells Fast Company. Donald Sherman, executive director and chief counsel at the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, said while it’s not a Hatch Act violation, “agency employees are legally bound to provide nonpartisan service to their constituents.” “A government shutdown causes stress for the public regardless of political affiliation; it is wildly inappropriate for agency leadership to politicize the situation and blame political enemies,” Sherman said. A civic institution meets cable news spin Other government agencies have communicated the shutdown online without partisan messaging, like NASA, which has a banner that reads “Due to the lapse in federal government funding, NASA is not updating this website. The White House took a far less neutral stancethough the website displayed toned-down rhetoric by Wednesday afternoon. The news ticker swapped out its messaging blaming Democrats for the shutdown with an update to watch the White House press briefing, during which Vice President JD Vance made a surprise cameo and said he doesn’t think the shutdown will be long. After the briefing, whitehouse.gov scrapped the news ticker. The countdown clock on the White House homepage reading “Democrats Have Shut Down The Government” above its top navigation, however, remains.
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E-Commerce
It looks like it could be sitting on the campus of any number of major universities across the country, but this sleek, glass-lined educational building is far from the conventional teaching space: It’s a new training facility for the Ironworkers Local 63 union in Chicago. The training facility is being used to give young ironworkers hands-on experience welding, climbing, and installing the essential elements that underlie buildings around the world. As anxiety snowballs over just which professions will survive the emergence of artificial intelligence, physical trades like ironwork are seeming more and more AI proofthe building itself a counterargument to the perception that a promising career path necessarily starts at a university. [Photo: Tom Harris/Gensler] The building was designed by architecture and design firm Gensler and is located in the town of Broadview on the outskirts of Chicago. It’s a school of hopefully no hard knocks, where apprentice ironworkers will learn to move and weld multi-ton pieces of steel inside what is essentially a giant glass jewel box. [Photo: Tom Harris/Gensler] Despite the role’s name, ironwork involves a wide range of construction processes that go far beyond welding massive metal beams. More than half the union’s work in recent years has been installing glass curtain wallsthe smooth facades that shimmer on skyscrapers the world over. Paul Wende saw the trendlines. He’s the union’s business manager, financial secretary, and treasurer, and he set out to give the unionworkers a place to refine those skills without having to learn on the job. “Everything we do has to line up. Everything from the floors to the ceilings tie into the horizontals on the windows. Everything goes off of that glass. So it’s got to be perfect. The architects really go over it with a fine-tooth comb,” he says. “Well, if you’ve got to be perfect, you better train on it.” [Photo: Tom Harris/Gensler] The West Point of training centers Rather than just finding empty space in a workaday warehouse, Wende had a higher vision for the facility. “What I wanted to do was turn that school into the West Point of training centers,” he says. The Chicago Plumbers Local 130 UA Training Center [Photo: Tom Harris/Gensler] Wende might have had his mind on the upper echelons of the U.S. military, but it was another local trade union that became the true model to follow. In the mid-2010s, the Chicago Plumbers Union opened a state-of-the-art training facility that brought its apprentice workers out of a musty basement and into a clean, well-lit educational building. Gensler also designed that building, and Wende approached the firm’s Chicago office seeking a project suited to his own union’s trade. [Photo: Tom Harris/Gensler] The building is a teaching tool for future IW 63 workers The design that emerged is an elegant three-story building wrapped in curving dark glass on its front side, and highlighted with a bright red “IW 63” sign on its corner. Inside, it’s specially outfitted with structures and tools that are used on a daily basis by ironworkers when they’re erecting buildings and installing their facades. “They can build and then disassemble an entire three-story building within the space that they can then install curtain wall on,” says Scott Hurst, a principal at Gensler who led the project. “The building itself is an instrument. It’s a teaching tool.” [Photo: Tom Harris/Gensler] Hurst says the entire building was designed to offer educational opportunities. There’s a bridge crane at the top of the space that can move five-ton iron beams, and the structure that holds up that crane can also be used to practice rigging and panel installation. There’s a central spiral staircase (another ironworker installation task), revolving and sliding doors (ditto), operable skylights (ditto), and solar panels (ditto). “When you think of all of the things that you might find Local 63 performing out in the field, this building is really meant to embody those and demonstrate those in a kind of real way,” Hurst says. The exterior is also a reflection of the trade’s abilities. The shape of the glass facade, with its slight concave curvature, was inspired by a weld bead, and is meant to evoke the elegant side of what ironworkers can do. In an architecturally rich city like Chicago, Local 63 has had more than its share of high-profile projects, from the skyscraper thrill experience Tilt on the 94th floor of the John Hancock building to the mirrored polish of the Bean. For Wende, it was important that the training facility had some of the same architectural panache. “We do all this cool, ornate stuff and no one ever really knew who we were,” he says. “Until now.” [Photo: Tom Harris/Gensler] The Gensler-designed training center is also a marketing tool The building has garnered its own kind of celebrity status, hosting local politicians, events, and training sessions for visiting ironworkers. Within the first week of the building’s opening it hosted an international ironworkers competition, where ironworkers were speed-climbing the columns inside the facility and rigging up cross beams. It’s also part of the way the union aims to attract new talent. Wende says there’s been consistent interest in the union for years, but the new building only broadens the trade’s appeal. “It is a marketing tool beyond belief for what we do and who we are,” Wende says. [Photo: Tom Harris/Gensler] Making the building work for ironworkers and lure in the next generation became a major part of the design process. “As we think about Gen Z and their changing appetites towards what might be future-proof careers, recognizing that if we want people to take pride in the craftsmanship and the work that they do, they deserve facilities that fill them with that pride,” Hurst says. Beyond the trade, the building is beneficial to the architecture and development community. While ironworkers use the facility to train, builders and designers can use it to test out new ways of making buildings. “All the questions that a contractor might have when it comes to how to construct something, or the ease of construction, or even cost concerns, can be alleviated by taking them through a facility like this, Hurst says. The facility had one extra benefit for the union itself. Local 63’s own union ironworkers helped build the project. Job security is literally built in.
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E-Commerce
David Droga was the face of Accenture Song even before it was called Accenture Song. The ad legend sold his agency Droga5 to Accenture’s creative advertising and marketing division then-called Accenture Interactive in 2019. He became CEO of that division in 2021, and rebranded Interactive as Accenture Song in 2022. So when he stepped down in May, the $20 billion company was not only losing its CEO, it was also losing the voice of the agency. Named to lead the new era was Ndidi Oteh, who comes from leading Songs operations in the Americas, and has been at Accenture for about 14 years, where in her previous role she was the global account lead for Nike, and retail industry strategy and consulting lead for the West Coast. Earlier this month, Oteh officially sat down behind the CEO desk. Song is facing a lot of the same challenges as the rest of the advertising and marketing services industry: layoffs, restructuring, and shifting client budgetsall as AI wreaks havoc on the traditional ways of doing business. But its new CEO believes it has the tools and capabilities to thrive. Droga once told AdAge, “You either grow into the future or you’re shrinking into the past.” Oteh says that thanks to Drogas vision of bringing creativity together with Accentures technology and business services, Song has had a head start in preparing for the future of marketing and advertising. Despite its size, Song is still just about 30% of Accenture’s overall business. The larger parent is a broad, global consultancy that specializes in digital transformation and operations efficiency. Not only does this give Song the opportunity to pair its capabilities with Accenture’s, it also shields it from some of the ebb and flow of the ad industry as those industries figure out how to navigate a world where success means more than producing great creative. This isnt a conversation about having a great Super Bowl ad, one could argue it never was, she says. The reality is now, we aren’t only talking about marketing. We’re talking about marketing, customer service, social commerce, sales, creating digital products, and how that should all be powered by AI. We have always had the right pieces, but we are now connecting all of it in a way that’s very different. Industry of one In Accentures most recent earnings report, released last week, Songs revenue was up by 8% to $20 billion. Despite the positive results, Song is not immune to the shifts in its business. As of September 1, Accenture bundled services including strategy, consulting, Song, technology, and operations into a single integrated business unit called Reinvention Services. Song’s parent company, which has a workforce of about 800,000, also laid off more than 11,000 employees over the last three months as part of a $865 million restructuring program. The holding company model is in a state of flux, with significant consolidation reflecting the need for greater efficiency. Omnicom and Interpublic are merging to create the worlds largest advertising and marketing services holding company. Publicis recently combined Publicis Worldwide and Leo Burnett into a single entity called Leo. The promise of the holding company model has always been to deliver world-class creative and strategy at scale, with technology, media, and everything else all under one roof. Traditionally, a major hurdle has been overcoming the fact that most of these capabilities are from separate companies, gradually acquired by the holding company, and silod from each other in a way that is both confusing and inefficient for the clients. Companies under the same parent have often been competing against each other more than collaborating, with clients complaining about workflow bottlenecks and a lack of consistency. All the recent consolidation is an effort to strip away these barriers. In 2022, Song itself consolidated a number of the creative agencies under its roof, moving all but Droga5 under one P&L. Song has made more acquisitions in the last few years. In August, it acquired social and influencer agency Superdigital. And in 2024, it bought consumer engagement firm Unlimited, digital design and tech agency Work & Co., and Brazilian creative shop Soko. Oteh says that Song approaches acquisitions through the lens of capability, building, and expansion. In most cases, we either already have the capability, and we’re saying we want to do more, or we’re saying we see this is where the future is heading, and we want to make sure that we have it, she says. The key is how its integrated into the company as a whole. How do we embed it so all of us lift, not that there’s just this siloed organization? she says. If we cant, that doesn’t help you drive reinvention. Our clients are asking for a company that understands how everything’s connected, how to bring people together, and how to bring different functions and capabilities to be able to drive those harmonized customer experiences. Oteh says Song sits apart from the ad holding companies by virtue of its own parent company. I don’t really think about where Accenture fits in comparison to holding companies, says Oteh. Song is powered by Accenture, and that means the foundation of technology. Actually understanding your datawhat it takes to build an AI infrastructureis what Accenture does every day. In many cases, Accenture is already helping them with the infrastructure, so that allows us to have different types of insights into what they need to do to really make sure they’re driving growth with their customers. I think that puts us in what feels a little bit like an industry of one. Growth engine CMO A decade ago, Oteh says that many CMOs had given away a lot of the core components of their brands connections to the customer. The technology teams owned the consumer data, as well as the strategy around digital tools like e-commerce. In too many C-suites, the CMO was brand-only. Oteh says this has shifted dramatically. They were spending a lot of time talking about what to build from a messaging and marketing perspective, but the other core components of what it takes to truly understand your customer had been given out, she says. Now, there’s not a CMO today who is not talking about two things: First, I have to do more with less. And second, getting better insight ot of my customer data to drive forward. For Oteh, CMOs should be the growth engine again for their company, instead of marketing being the first stop when cuts need to be made. The CMO wants to be at the center again, and in order to do that, they have to really make sure that they’re modernizing the way in which they work, she says. Maybe gone are the days where you have 100 different agencies that you’re working with. Maybe gone are the days that you’re spending most of your time doing your operational tasks that truly can be done through AI. There has to be a transition, and every single CMO that we talk to today is saying, ‘How do you help us get there?'” Back in 2022, Droga told me the key to Songs success was about making sure that it can effectively combine its strengths with those of the rest of Accenture’s capabilities. Now, Oteh says the real challenge is to do everything theyve been doing, but faster. So many of the opportunities that we’ve had over the past year are not just about marketing, but about sales, customer service, design, building a product, and connectivity to finance, she says. And that did not used to happen at the rate that is happening now.
Category:
E-Commerce
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