470
Opinion of the Court
contrast, the denial of compensation for lower paid, nonpolicymaking employees will inevitably diminish their expressive output.
The large-scale disincentive to Government employees' expression also imposes a significant burden on the public's right to read and hear what the employees would otherwise have written and said. See Virginia Bd. of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, Inc., 425 U. S. 748, 756-757 (1976). We have no way to measure the true cost of that burden, but we cannot ignore the risk that it might deprive us of the work of a future Melville or Hawthorne.16
The honoraria ban imposes the kind of burden that abridges speech under the First Amendment.
IV
Because the vast majority of the speech at issue in this case does not involve the subject matter of Government employment and takes place outside the workplace, the Government is unable to justify § 501(b) on the grounds of immediate workplace disruption asserted in Pickering and the cases that followed it. Cf., e. g., Waters, 511 U. S., at 664. Instead, the Government submits that the ban comports with the First Amendment because the prohibited honoraria were "reasonably deemed by Congress to interfere with the efficiency of the public service." Public Workers v. Mitchell, 330 U. S. 75, 101 (1947).
In Mitchell we upheld the prohibition of the Hatch Act, 5 U. S. C. § 7324(a)(2), on partisan political activity by all classified federal employees, including, for example, a skilled me-16 These authors' familiar masterworks would survive the honoraria ban as currently administered. Besides exempting all books, the OGE regulations protect fiction and poetry from the ban's coverage, see infra, at 476, although the statute's language is not so clear. But great artists deal in fact as well as fiction, and some deal in both. See, e. g., Allen, The Solitary Singer, at 41-55 (discussing Walt Whitman's speeches and nonfiction newspaper writing).
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