President Biden’s get-out-the-vote effort on college campuses nationwide could represent an illegal interpretation of federal law, lawyers are warning in a new report. The Department of Education’s new voter registration effort via college work-study programs is said to be the culprit. 

In February of this year, the Education Department said in a policy letter that they believe Federal Work-Study money “may be used for employment by a Federal, State, local, or Tribal public agency for civic engagement work that is not associated with a particular interest or group.” Work-study money is typically used for students who take part-time jobs on their campuses. 

According to the College Fix, some lawyers are adamant that the use of work study funds for voter registration and get-out-the-vote efforts represents a violation of multiple federal laws because the funds could be used for partisan purposes. 

The Biden administration argues that the expansion of work-study funds to include voter registration is permitted under the Higher Education Act of 1965 and the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008. Those laws allow for the use of federal funds to pay students who “increase civic participation” in their communities. 

One lawyer at the Heritage Foundation, Hans von Spakovsky, tells the College Fix that the Higher Education Act “simply says that universities should do their best to distribute voter registration information to their own students,” not to pay political activists to engage in partisan activities. 

“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,” he warns. 

Another lawyer with the Defense of Freedom Institute for Policy Studies, Robert Eitel, says the Biden administration is taking a “heavy hand” in registering a typically reliable Democratic voter demographic this year. 

“​​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,” Mr. Eitel says. 

The Education Department’s decision to pay these students to register voters was born of Mr. Biden’s Executive Order 14019, which was signed in March 2021. The order asked all federal agencies to “consider ways to expand citizens’ opportunities to register to vote and to obtain information about, and participate in, the electoral process.”

“It is the policy of my Administration to promote and defend the right to vote for all Americans who are legally entitled to participate in elections,” the order states. “It is the responsibility of the Federal Government to expand access to, and education about, voter registration and election information, and to combat misinformation, in order to enable all eligible Americans to participate in our democracy.”

In April, Republican state attorneys general asked the Education Department to rescind the policy letter, arguing that it could be a violation of the Hatch Act — a federal law that restricts those on a federal payroll from participating in partisan activities. 

“Although Congress did not say that work ‘in the public interest’ excludes political activity, that logic seems obvious,” they wrote. “The taxpayers should not have to foot the bill for anyone’s political activity, regardless of who benefits.”

“Voter-registration efforts can serve overtly political functions even when they seem facially non-partisan, as turning out the right voters is often a matter of knowing where to boost ‘broad-based’ turnout,” they continued.