The House committee with oversight of elections is subpoenaing 15 members of the Biden administration’s Cabinet regarding the implementation of the president’s executive order to use federal agencies to partner with left-leaning groups for get-out-the-vote purposes in 2024.
The House Administration Committee is investigating President Joe Biden’s Executive Order 14919, signed in March 2021, that requires federal agencies to partner with private interests to boost voter participation. The committee previously advanced legislation to block funding of the order.
“Elections are partisan, but our election administration should never be partisan,” House Administration Committee Chairman Bryan Steil, R-Wis., said in a public statement. “Allowing federal employees from the Biden administration to flood election administration sites threatens election integrity and reduces Americans’ confidence.”
The Biden administration has been secretive about the implementation of the plan. Critics of the order have called it “Bidenbucks.”
Records obtained by The Daily Signal and watchdog groups show the private actors partnering with agencies, or communicating with Biden White House officials, on the order have been left-leaning groups such as Demos and the American Civil Liberties Union, the Brennan Center, the Southern Poverty Law Center, leftist billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, and the Stacey Abrams-founded Fair Fight Action.
Republicans objected, noting this could prompt federal employees to violate the Hatch Act, a law that prevents partisan political activity using federal time or resources, as well as violate the Antideficiency Act, wherein federal agencies cannot spend public money on matters not authorized by Congress.
“This Executive Order is another attempt by the Biden Administration to tilt the scales ahead of 2024,” Steil continued. “I will continue working to provide transparency and accountability on this administration’s latest scheme as Congress did not appropriate taxpayer funds for partisan activities.”
Biden administration officials have argued the executive order is about promoting voter accessibility and ensuring that voting is easier.
The House Committee on Small Business has been investigating the Small Business Administration’s efforts to register voters, and held a hearing on June 5.
“During a time when small businesses are struggling, the SBA has decided to focus efforts not on inflation or access to capital, but instead to register voters in a swing state,” House Small Business Committee Chairman Roger Williams, R-Texas, said in a public statement. “This is completely unacceptable.”
In March, the SBA announced a Memorandum of Understanding with the Michigan Department of State, the chief election agency for the battleground state, to facilitate voter registration efforts ahead of the 2024 election cycle.
The Biden administration has shown a lack of transparency on the order, Stewart Whitson, senior director of federal affairs for the conservative watchdog group Foundation for Government Accountability, told the House panel last week.
“If this was aboveboard, if it was everything the other side claims it is, wouldn’t you be shouting from the hills the details of this plan?” Whitson told the House Small Business Committee. “Wouldn’t you be proud to go on and say exactly what SBA is doing and where it’s doing [it] and how it’s doing it, if it were aboveboard? And so, the lack of transparency is a huge problem. It was a problem from Day One. The order came out in 2021.”
