Media Must Cover OMB Cuts as Attack on Disabled Voters

The White House Office of Management and Budget wants to ban federal grant money from being used for voter registration drives — threatening funding that 57 nonprofits use to help disabled Americans vote in every state and territory. Congress created this funding in 2002 through the bipartisan Help America Vote Act. Russell Vought is now moving to kill it by executive fiat, in direct defiance of Congress's constitutional power of the purse. A Stanford law professor was blunt: even if the rule wasn't designed to disenfranchise disabled voters, "it's going to have that kind of effect."

This is part of a deliberate pattern. The same administration has banned voter registration at naturalization ceremonies, barred colleges from using work-study funds for registration drives, and rescinded Biden's executive order expanding voting access. Vought himself has admitted his goal: he condemned Biden's voter access efforts for increasing registration "especially among Democratic Party supporters." The target is not fraud. The target is turnout.

We call on the media to cover the OMB's proposed rule not as a bureaucratic grant policy story, but as a deliberate attack on the voting rights of disabled Americans — veterans with brain injuries, nursing home residents, people who cannot drive to a registration office 30 miles away. The public deserves reporting that names who gets silenced when this funding disappears and connects it to the administration's broader campaign to make voting harder for everyone it can't win over.