(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) The Biden administration has established a scheme that forces colleges and universities to pay students with taxpayer dollars to “get out the vote.”
Lawyers told the College Fix that this is an unprecedented interpretation of the Higher Education Act that’s likely illegal.
In February 2024, the U.S. Department of Education announced that federal work-study funds that are typically meant to assist college students in offsetting tuition costs by working a part-time campus job could be used to pay students for “broad-based get-out-the-vote activities,” the news source reported.
In April 2022, the department’s financial aid office sent a memo to universities, warning them that their federal funding could be in jeopardy if they do not distribute voter registration forms, citing the Higher Education Act’s call to make a “good faith effort” to do so.
Several observers described the action as a partisan — and likely illegal — effort by the Biden administration to coerce universities to pay college students with tax dollars to conduct voter registration efforts on campuses that are overwhelmingly stocked with far-left students who would “vote blue no matter who.”
Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow in the Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, for example, said that the cited section of the Higher Education Act “simply says that universities should do their best to distribute voter registration information to their own students.”
“It does not authorize the use of federal funds to pay students to engage in such activities, particularly to pay them to go outside of their college community to register voters who are not students. That is unprecedented,” von Spakovsky said.
According to Robert Eitel, president of the Defense of Freedom Institute for Policy Studies, who served as senior counselor to the Secretary of Education from 2017 through 2020 under the Trump administration, the Biden administration is overreaching to get more people to vote for Biden.
“The responsibility of colleges and universities that receive federal financial aid to ‘make a good faith effort’ to provide voter registration forms to students has been a relatively uncontroversial requirement of federal student aid compliance for decades, but leave it to the Biden administration to politicize the most generic of requirements,” Eitel said.
He also said the Biden administration’s “heavy hand” is an aggressive reading of the Higher Education Act of 1965.
“When one combines this guidance with the president’s illegal efforts to cancel student loans, it gives off a pretty putrid partisan aroma,” Eitel said.
