The Biden-Harris administration appears to be stonewalling a congressional probe of its secretive executive order directing every federal agency to register and mobilize voters.
The powerful House Oversight Committee is threatening to force the White House to comply if it doesn’t quickly turn over the documents and information the committee requested regarding the controversial directive, according to a letter I obtained exclusively from Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., to Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young.
Executive Order 14019 on “Promoting Access to Voting” requires offices under the control of the Biden-Harris administration — from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Department of Education — to register the millions of people with whom they interact, the many beneficiaries of the programs these agencies administer. Not only that, but the executive order suggests that the agencies partner with putatively nonpartisan third-party organizations to do so.
The White House issued the order in March 2021 with the explicit intent of registering more nonwhite voters — cohorts that tend to vote disproportionately Democrat — claiming they face “significant obstacles,” rooted in discriminatory policies, to participate in elections.
The ideas in the order largely originated inside the leftist Demos think tank, and the order seemingly includes built-in bias toward turning out likely Democrat voters under Democrat-dominated agencies. Due to those factors, plus left-wing NGOs’ support of and compliance with the order, many have likened this public-private voting initiative to the “Zuckbucks” effort of the 2020 election, dubbing the 2024 effort “Bidenbucks.”
Zuckbucks resulted in the corruption of election administration and perhaps the manipulation of election outcomes through its outsourcing to leftist groups funded by hundreds of millions in private dollars. Bidenbucks also results in the corruption of election administration and may too lead to the manipulation of election outcomes through the federal bureaucracy’s usurpation of state control over elections — a bureaucracy possessive of virtually limitless resources that’s apparently again in cahoots with like-minded left-wing groups.
[READ: ‘Bidenbucks’ Make ‘Zuckbucks’ Look Like Chump Change]
Congress never delegated powers to the administrative state to effectively interfere in state election processes, meaning that interference violates both the consent of the governed and the federalist principles on which our republic is based.
The Biden-Harris administration has divulged little about the order beyond press releases and a handful of agency-specific documents. It has routinely ignored oversight requests from Republican lawmakers. It has rebuffed relevant questions from journalists, as I found in reporting on the directive for RealClearInvestigations last summer.
But documents unearthed by the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project via the Freedom of Information Act and the Foundation for Government Accountability’s litigation efforts have raised alarm bells that the order may constitute a thinly veiled taxpayer-funded Democrat get-out-the-vote effort.
Troubled by the administration’s lack of transparency, and dubious of the legality if not constitutionality of the executive branch engaging in voter registration work, the House Oversight Committee opened a probe into the directive in May.
As I reported for RealClearPolitics, Comer then asked Director Young for a slew of documents and information regarding the order. These included the strategic plans each agency was to produce to execute the order, a list of the third-party organizations with which the executive branch had partnered and the grounds for approving those partners, and the constitutional or statutory basis for the order.
Comer’s follow-up letter indicates that over three months later, OMB has produced nothing other than a “short letter response” — one month past the original May 28 deadline of the oversight request.
The perfunctory OMB letter, which I obtained and reviewed, maintains that the order “does not direct agencies to take any action to register to vote any individuals who are not legally entitled to vote” — in a seeming bid to blunt claims raised by state officials that authorities are potentially registering illegal aliens to vote under the order. OMB refers the House Oversight Committee to individual agencies “regarding activities [they have engaged in] under the order.”
OMB has not given the committee any of the documents sought nor even a timeline detailing when it might produce them “despite several requests” from investigators, according to the letter. Should OMB fail to produce the requested documents by Sept. 2, Comer says the committee “will consider additional measures, including use of the compulsory process” — which could include subpoenas — “to gain compliance and obtain this critical material.”
In response to my inquiries in connection with the letter, Comer said:
One of the first steps in election integrity is ensuring a transparent process before, during, and after election day. The American people deserve to know how the Biden Administration’s voting executive order is being implemented, and who the outside groups are that are being granted access to federal property. If there truly is no partisan bias in the executive order’s implementation, OMB and the Biden-Harris Administration should have no problem cooperating with the Oversight Committee’s investigation. Instead, the White House is continuing to stonewall the Committee’s efforts to provide transparency.
The House Oversight Committee’s escalation in its effort to obtain information about the order follows news that attorneys general from nine states recently filed suit against the Biden administration seeking to halt the order and ultimately have it declared unlawful and unconstitutional. As The Federalist recently reported, this is one of several challenges to the executive order winding its way through the courts.
Should the House Oversight Committee ultimately obtain the requested documents and information, it could prove pivotal in bolstering the plaintiffs’ cases against the Biden administration.
But with early voting starting in just three weeks, even an immediate nationwide injunction would mean the Biden-Harris administration will have been working to register and mobilize potentially millions of voters, in cahoots with like-minded NGOs, for over three years.
