Dallas, TX — Freedom Foundation CEO Aaron Withe issued the following statement today after Governor Kathy Hochul signed legislation targeting the organization’s efforts to inform New York public employees of their constitutional rights:

“Governor Kathy Hochul signed a law whose entire purpose is to silence the Freedom Foundation for telling New York’s public employees the truth about their constitutional rights.

“A10835A isn’t about protecting anyone. It’s a hit job. It exists because government unions in New York are terrified of an inconvenient fact: when public employees learn they don’t have to pay union dues, a lot of them stop. So instead of making their case to their own members, union bosses ran to their friends in the legislature and got them to write a law that makes speech illegal.

“New York didn’t invent this playbook. They copied it from Oregon — where our lawsuit against an almost identical law is already working its way through the courts. Hochul knows this. She signed it anyway, because the goal was never constitutionality. The goal was to make an example of us and scare off anyone else who might try.

“It won’t work. We didn’t back down in Oregon, and we’re not backing down in New York.”