President Joe Biden’s administration’s efforts to infuse campus workers with cash to help with get-out-the-vote efforts might have been illegal.

Several lawyers are warning that the Department of Education’s decision to pay students to register voters with funds earmarked for work-study programs for students who work part-time on-campus jobs could be against the law. 

The Education Department based its decision on Biden’s Executive Order 14019 that was signed in March 2021. The order encouraged “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.”

The Biden administration pointed to the Higher Education Act of 1965 and the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008, which permit the use of federal funds to pay students who “increase civic participation.” 

However, Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow in the Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, told 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.”

“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,” he said. “That is unprecedented.” 

Von Spakovsky also noted that Section 487(a)(23) of the Higher Education Act “does not apply in any state that either has same-day voter registration or does not require voter registration.”

“Thus, even under its mistaken interpretation of the law, the Department of Education has no authority to require colleges in those 23 states and the District of Columbia to engage in any voter registration activities of any kind,” he said.

Robert Eitel, a lawyer with the Defense of Freedom Institute for Policy Studies, said the Biden administration’s decision is engaging in partisan activity as college campuses typically possess a higher Democratic voter demographic. 

“​​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.

The lawyers argue the get-out-the-vote initiative on college campuses pushed by the Biden administration could be in violation of the Antideficiency Act, which prohibits the use of federal funds for purposes beyond their appropriation, and the Hatch Act, which limits the political activities of people paid by the federal government. 

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In April, nearly 20 Republican state attorneys general called on the Department of Education to reverse its guidance calling on school administrators to use federal funds to pay students for get-out-the-vote efforts. 

“In other words, laudable activities like encouraging voter turnout and registering voters have to happen somewhere, and that somewhere decides elections,” they said. “Your guidance effectively licenses colleges and universities to subsidize this activity—and potentially swing elections by choosing where to direct these funds—with taxpayer money.”