DC Brewery Sues Trump Administration Over Government Shutdown

brewery, DC Brewery Sues Trump Administration Over Government ShutdownOne of Washington, DC’s most popular craft breweries Atlas Brew Works is suing the Trump Administration over its part in the partial government shutdown.

According to CNN the brewery’s lawsuit “claims the administration is harming its free speech rights by requiring compliance with a federal law administered by an agency whose operations are not funded through the shutdown.”

What Atlas Brew Works is indirectly referencing is the closure of the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (affectionately referred to as the TTB by the industry).

The TTB is the federal organization that oversees things like brewery applications, beer labels, and loans. And breweries who distribute across state lines can’t do that without product-specific label approval.

Atlas has been unable to receive approval for a new apricot IPA called “The Precious One,” because the Treasury Department’s Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau has not been processing applications through the shutdown. And by not being permitted to sell that IPA to its “out-of-state customers, the brewer claims, it’s not being allowed to speak to them.”

brewery, DC Brewery Sues Trump Administration Over Government Shutdown“We are asking the court to allow us to speak to our customers during this shutdown by permitting Atlas to sell our beer to out of state consumers,” Justin Cox, founder and CEO of Atlas, told CNN via email.

The shutdown, which ends funding for around 25% of federal services and leaves 800,000 members of staff without pay, means that government agencies must postpone all non-essential work until the government is restored and the TTB’s oversight is deemed “non-essential.”

And as Fortune astutely points out, “Even when the government does reopen, there’s likely to be a tremendous backlog of labels for approval, which will cause further delays.”

Atlas Brew Works is one of the cornerstone participants in the PayitFurloughed campaign, a beer-funding effort that takes a “pay it forward’ approach to providing furloughed federal workers with free beer.

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