When Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the nonprofit organizations he controlled would not spend hundreds of millions of dollars as they had in the past to help targeted populations vote in 2024, then-President Joe Biden turned to taxpayers instead. Biden’s Executive Order 14019 was an illegal use of federal resources for political activities, and President Donald Trump was right to rescind the order as one of his first acts in office. Both Congress and the Department of Justice should investigate any employees who carried out Biden’s order.
In theory, it is a good idea that a nonpartisan nonprofit organization should help citizens register to vote. But which voters should be targeted? And how? Democrats used to think any increase in voter participation helped their party. But that has ceased to be true since Trump came along. Now, most low-propensity voters are Trump supporters, which means allies of the Democratic Party, as Zuckerberg used to be, had to be more careful about which communities they spent money registering voters in to achieve a partisan benefit.
Studies show that is what Zuckerberg’s nonprofit organizations did, pouring almost all of their money into minority communities with a history of high Democratic Party margins. After a wave of bad publicity and investigations in 2021, however, Zuckerberg announced he would not fund any more registration drives.
Enter Biden’s Executive Order 14019, which directed political appointees at every federal agency to “promote voter registration and voter participation.” This ended up including the Department of Health and Human Services sending voter registration to healthcare.gov enrollees, the Department of Education using federal work-study dollars for voter registration, the Department of Agriculture sending voter registration information to child nutrition program recipients, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development working with public-housing authorities to register voters.
Did these agencies have any experience running voter registration drives? No. Their experience is, or at least should be, in health, education, farming, and nutrition. Instead, the work was farmed out to Democratic Party-friendly nonprofit groups such as Demos.
The Hatch Act of 1939 forbids federal employees, including political appointees, from engaging in political activities while on the job. Biden, the Democratic Party, and the career civil servants who carried out Executive Order 14019 will argue that their voter registration activities were not political because they are not explicitly promoting Democratic candidates.
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But just as Zuckerbucks helped Democratic candidates by targeting only certain populations, government programs are used by some demographic groups more than others. There is no nonpartisan way to marry the delivery of government services with nonpartisan election activities.
The Hatch Act made clear that Biden’s Executive Order 14019 was illegal as drafted, and any government employee who implemented it acted illegally. The Trump Justice Department should prosecute those employees who planned and executed these programs. If the prosecutions fail, Congress should amend the Hatch Act to be clear that federal agency employees may not do anything connected with election activities on the taxpayers’ dime.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
