Scrapping ‘Bidenbucks,’ Trump pulls federal government out of election meddling

The “Bidenbucks” executive order directing federal agencies to boost voter participation has gone the way of the Biden administration.

President Donald Trump eliminated Executive Order 14019, which President Joe Biden signed in March 2021, calling for federal agencies to partner with private “voter-advocacy groups” and to develop “strategic plans.”

Trump signed what amounted to an omnibus executive order that scrapped almost 80 executive actions taken by Biden. The title was “Initial Recissions of Harmful Executive Orders and Actions.”

Congressional scrutiny and watchdog groups, such as the Foundation for Government Accountability, which sued for records on the order, were “enough to slow-roll implementation of the order to ensure that people, and not partisan bureaucrats” decided the 2024 election, said Stewart Whitson, senior director of federal affairs for the foundation.

“President Trump should be commended for getting rid of the ‘Bidenbucks’ scandal,” Whitson told The Daily Signal. “This shows the president is committed to stopping weaponized government.”

Whitson later added, “Now, it’s about accountability.”

The group intends to continue its litigation in the appeals process to find out which federal bureaucrats were involved in election activities when implementing the order.

Repealing the order is an important first step, but shouldn’t be the end of it, said Ken Cuccinelli, national chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative.

“President Trump is correcting a great injustice by simply canceling Biden’s EO 14019, by which he sought to enlist the federal government to accomplish his own (and ultimately Kamala Harris’) re-election as president,” Cuccinelli, a former Virginia attorney general, told The Daily Signal in an email. “With the new and open administration, we should finally learn what really happened under EO 14019, as the Biden administration continuously and illegally stonewalled all efforts at transparency.”

As noted in my book “The Myth of Voter Suppression,” Demos, a liberal think tank, drafted the Biden initiative and was among the private groups to implement the order, which has been largely shrouded in secrecy.

Biden’s Justice Department also has refused to release its strategic plan, citing “presidential privilege,” in a lawsuit brought by the Foundation for Government Accountability, a government watchdog group. The House Administration Committee subpoenaed federal agencies for records on how the order was being implemented, but the Biden administration didn’t comply.

The Daily Signal first reported using various public records requests that under the order federal agencies cooperated with numerous left-leaning advocacy organization, such as Demos, the American Civil Liberties Union, the League of Women Voters, the Brennan Center for Justice, the Stacey Abrams-founded Fair Fight Action, and other organizations. Many of the records were obtained through requests from states or smaller agencies.

Trump should be credited for not keeping the order in place for his own political ends, said Hans von Spakovsky, manager of the Election Law Reform Initiative at The Heritage Foundation.

“Donald Trump, instead of keeping an illegal program in place to help Republicans get elected as Biden thought it would help Democrats get elected, got rid of it altogether,” von Spakovsky told The Daily Signal.

The Biden White House regularly defended the order as promoting access to voting. Also, the platform adopted at last year’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago heralded the Biden election order.

“Within the first 100 days of his presidency, President Biden signed an executive order directing an all-of-government effort to promote access to voting,” says the 2024 Democratic platform, agreed to by convention delegates. “Agencies have taken historic action to help veterans, college students, Native Americans, and other underserved communities register to vote.”

Under Biden’s executive order, the Internal Revenue Service, the Obamacare exchanges, and U.S. Bureau of Prisons have been among the agencies most active in promoting voting, according to a report by a coalition of liberal groups led by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights last spring, when the order was two years old.

Many congressional Republicans, as well as government watchdog groups, expressed concern about federal agencies’ engaging in partisan political activity in violation of laws such as the Hatch Act, a law that prohibits federal employees from using work time or resources for partisan political activities.

[Editor’s note: This story originally was published by The Daily Signal.]