President Joe Biden may have left the presidential race, but “Bidenbucks” lives on.
And you can bet your federal tax bill that the Biden administration will be revving up the taxpayer-funded, get-out-the-vote machine for not-so-accidental candidate Vice President Kamala Harris.
“I think they definitely will,” Hans von Spakovsky, a former member of the Federal Election Commission and manager of the Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative, told me in an interview this week. “I think what they’re doing is an unlawful use of federal taxpayer dollars, and I don’t think any president has the right to do it.”
Documents obtained by the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project expose federal agencies working with left-wing activist groups in targeting traditionally Democrat voters to cast mail-in ballots for Biden’s No. 2 in November’s election. And there appears no slowdown in the constitutionally suspect initiative now that Biden has withdrawn from his reelection run and endorsed his leftist lieutenant.
“We have published thousands of records showing this is a mass mobilization of the federal government to enhance and advance the presidential reelection effort,” Kyle Brosnan, chief legal counsel for the Oversight Project told me in a recent interview.
The initiative runs a microsite containing the trove of records it has contained in pursuit of tracking Biden’s Executive Order 14019. Signed soon after the Democrat took office in 2021, the order is innocuously billed as “Promoting Access to Voting.” But as government watchdogs like The Federalist and the Heritage Foundation have uncovered, the sweeping directive is oozing with partisanship.
Radical ‘Helpers’
Critics have called it Bidenbucks, a nod to the hundreds of millions of dollars in so-called election administration grants funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg during the Covid-captive 2020 election. The brunt of those grants went to Democrat cities to help target left-leaning voters. As I reported earlier this year, however, Bidenbucks is making “Zuckbucks” look like chump change.
As Brosnan notes, the executive order directed federal agencies to make plans to promote access to voting, particularly those agencies that engage directly with clients through welfare and other government programs. The agencies are to use taxpayer-funded resources to facilitate voter registration and mass mail-in ballots, as well as to assist their clients in completing the registration forms. And they do it all with the assistance of White House-approved nongovernmental organizations and state officials to accomplish those directives.
Who are the approved helpers? Why, they’re leftist groups, of course, just like they were in Zuckbucks ’20.
“We’ve been doing a number of investigations here at the Oversight Project over the last few years into this executive order, and we’ve found that all of the approved NGOs involved are left-wing organizations that promote radical ideas with elections, such as registering noncitizens to vote, using prisons as voter registrations hubs, and basically mobilizing all of the unsecured issues that we saw in 2020, basically when everyone was locked down,” Brosnan said.
Demos in the Details
At the core is the left-wing policy activist group Demos.
If you’re filling your leftist bingo card, Demos is closely tied to the far-left Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., wing of the Democrat Party, according to activist tracker InfluenceWatch.
“The organization emphasizes three areas of commitment: voting rights expansion, a hybrid environmentalist-left agenda it calls ‘pathways to ensure a diverse, expanded middle class in a new, sustainable economy,’ and advocacy for communitarianism and a liberal interpretation of racial equality,” InfluenceWatch reports.
As The Federalist reported earlier this year:
Biden tapped former Demos executive K. Sabeel Rahman to serve as Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs senior counselor and Chiraag Bains, the group’s former director of legal strategies, as the president’s deputy director of the Domestic Policy Council for Racial Justice and Equity at the White House. They were responsible for reviewing the actions taken to fulfill Bidenbucks, according to the Foundation for Government Accountability. The GOTV effort was being carried out by Susan Rice, Biden’s former domestic policy adviser who served as President Barack Obama’s national security adviser and ambassador to the United Nations.
The endgame is to find people in central locations to vote one way — the Democrat way — and make sure those mail-in votes are harvested.
What Do They Have to Hide?
The Biden administration has not only defied the Freedom of Information Act in blocking the release of related records, it has defied congressional subpoenas.
Tired of the administration’s stonewalling, U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil, R-Wis., over a month ago subpoenaed 15 Biden Cabinet officials demanding they turn over communications and other documents tied to Bidenbucks.
“Biden’s Voting Access Executive Order is the administration’s latest scheme to tilt the scales ahead of 2024,” Steil wrote on his X account. “I’ve subpoenaed the Biden admin for documents related to EO 14019 as Congress did NOT appropriate taxpayer funds for partisan activities.”
On Thursday, Steil told The Federalist that he was “very concerned by the Biden-Harris administration’s partisan voter registration scheme.”
“Federal agencies should never be used to influence the outcome of elections,” the congressman said. “The public deserves answers for how this Executive Order is being implemented, particularly as VP Harris becomes the new nominee.”
The Biden administration has fought several lawsuits in court. Biden’s Department of Justice incredibly argued to a federal judge in Washington, D.C., that the records are “presidential communication privileged” documents in siding with the corrupt administration. The lawsuit is being appealed. Republican senators introduced a bill that would ban federal agencies from using taxpayer funds to work with partisan “nonpartisan” organizations on voter mobilization efforts. The Democrat-controlled Senate would have none of it.
“If this is really a good government, good for the republic, public participation in the electoral system mechanism as the administration and congressional Democrats are claiming it is, then why are they fighting any attempt at transparency at any step?” Brosnan said.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
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