Trump Erases ‘Bidenbucks’

“Bidenbucks” was technically dead on arrival on President Donald Trump’s first day in office, but the election-influencing executive order that Trump’s predecessor signed nearly four years ago will take diligence to fully kill.

As David Craig, legal director for the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA), told The Federalist, Biden’s order “has substantial tentacles across government.” FGA has been on the frontlines of the battle against Bidenbucks since the executive order’s inception at the beginning of Biden’s term.

“The head is cut off the snake but the body continues to slither,” Craig said, noting how deeply embedded Bidenbucks is in every agency, each teeming with left-leaning bureaucrats. 

Soon after taking the oath of office on Monday, the new president rescinded scores of his predecessor’s edicts that Trump says “embedded deeply unpopular, inflationary, illegal, and radical practices within every agency and office of the Federal government.” Among the chloroformed is Biden’s Executive Order 14019. It has been expunged from the White House website. 

‘Convert the Federal Bureaucracy’

The so-called “Promoting Access to Voting” directive that Biden signed in early March 2021 was nothing more than a taxpayer-funded get-out-the-vote machine to elect Democrats. As The Federalist has reported, the order instructed federal agencies to assist in a nationwide voter registration promotion campaign. 

While Pravda press media outlets like NPR — also funded with tax dollars — insist that Republicans and election integrity watchdogs have provided “no substantial evidence” to justify their concerns, documents obtained through prolonged court battles show NPR doesn’t know what the hell it’s talking about. The executive branch campaign was created by far-left activists and carried out with the support of leftist nonprofits. And Biden’s DEI-embedded agencies clearly targeted traditionally Democrat voters. 

The constitutionally suspect executive order sparked several lawsuits challenging the GOTV scheme, including a federal complaint from attorneys general in nine states. Among the charges, the lawsuit alleges the Biden administration has usurped the appropriating power of Congress, which did not grant the executive branch authority to fund the unprecedented GOTV initiative. 

“President Biden has sought to convert the federal bureaucracy into a voter registration organization and to turn every interaction between a federal bureaucrat and a member of the public into a voter registration pitch,” the lawsuit asserts. “That exceeds any authority executive entities have under federal law, violates the Constitution, threatens States’ attempt to regulate voter registration, and thus ultimately undermines the voter registration systems set up by the States.” 

‘Enormous Amounts of Influence’

Biden’s executive order picked up the derisive nickname “Bidenbucks” because of its similarities to “Zuckbucks”, the hundreds of millions of dollars in so-called safe-election grants that the leftist Center for Tech and Civic Life handed out to election administrations in the lead up to the 2020 election. Funded by Meta/Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, the brunt of the grants went to Democrat-led cities in swing states to turn out left-leaning voters. 

Picking up on the success of Zuckbucks, Biden and his leftist friends expanded the scheme to use the full force of the federal government for a targeted GOTV effort. And the effort seemed to be everywhere. 

In Milwaukee, a big benefactor of the 2020 funding, it appears the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service — the agency that funds hot lunches and other meals in K-12 schools — was involved in a left-wing group’s efforts to get voting-age students in Milwaukee Public Schools to the polls. 

“We don’t know what kind of pressures were exerted on students … but it’s certainly apparent there was an effort to at least put enormous amounts of influence on our public schools, offering resources clearly with a leftist slant,” FGA’s Craig said, adding that his organization is not aware of any traditionally conservative groups “given that level of access” in Milwaukee’s schools. 

In New Mexico and Kansas, the Interior Department’s Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) schemed to use students in bureau-operated American Indian K-12 schools to carry voter registration cards home to their parents. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland seemed to step over the line of the federal Hatch Act, a law barring executive branch employees from overt political activities on the job, in promoting Bidenbucks. 

Federally Qualified Health Centers across the country worked alongside leftist activist group Vot-ER to register patients at taxpayer-funded health centers and clinics that provide primary care services to “underserved populations.” As Adam Gibbs, communications director for FGA, noted to The Federalist, welfare recipients vote for Democrats at a 30 percent higher clip than Republicans. 

The Federal Bureau of Prisons, under Bidenbucks, partnered with the League of Women Voters, the ACLU, the Campaign Legal Center, the Washington Lawyers’ Committee, and other far-left groups to bolster felon voting in the 2024 election. As The Daily Signal and The Federalist reported, the effort was not about the “right to vote” as much as it was about voting for the right people. 

A House Committee on Small Business investigation found the majority of Bidenbucks voter registration events in swing state Michigan occurred in the southern part of the state, “mainly in Democratic strongholds.”

Rep. Pete Stauber, R-Minn., destroyed the left’s claim that the SBA’s promotion of voter registration under Biden’s executive order was “bipartisan.”

“Roughly 91% of Michigan voters are registered to vote, with small business owners more likely to vote than the general population,” Stauber said. “If the purpose of the executive order is to register voters on a nonpartisan basis, why didn’t the SBA enter into an MOU with states that have lower voter registration than Michigan?” 

‘Substantial Tentacles’ of Bidenbucks

While a stroke of Trump’s pen ended the left’s voter turnout machine inside the federal government, it will take some time to fully clean the stain of Bidenbucks from the executive branch. 

“Clearly the [Trump] administration is where we would want them to be in making sure [Biden’s] order ceases to exist,” Craig said. “But the order has substantial tentacles across government which will take an effort from the new administration to uproot.”

Case in point, Biden’s executive order was still very much alive on the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission website on Wednesday morning. There were fingerprints of Bidenbucks in other agencies as well. 

The good news is, Bidenbucks proved to be a spectacular failure — this time. Not even a massive executive branch get-out-the-vote army targeting left-leaning voters could save the jobs of deeply unpopular Democrats — including the guy who signed Executive Order 14019. 

“You could say the Biden administration was so incompetent that they weren’t able to implement Bidenbucks well enough to give them a winning margin,” FGA’s Gibbs said. 

Exposure helped, Gibbs added. FGA and other organizations went after communications and other documents tied to Biden’s order. They endured long legal battles to obtain records from the obdurate administration that had much to hide. Republicans burned by Zuckbucks were particularly sensitive to the Bidenbucks scam, Gibbs said.

“News outlets like The Federalist raised the issues to members of Congress, who sued and blocked the more pernicious aspects of the order,” Gibbs said. “It had a blunting impact.” 

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.