Editor’s Note: The following is an article originally published on the College Fix on September 8, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission.
Conservative election integrity advocates praised the Trump administration for rescinding a Biden-era guidance that allowed Federal Work-Study funds to be used to employ students to perform election jobs.
The announcement came after the College Fix reported on multiple incidents of the work-study program being used to fund left-wing get-out-the-vote efforts.
Hans von Spakovsky, senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese Center, called the Biden-era work-study guidance an “abusive misuse” of tax dollars, intent on ensuring “liberal organizations supporting the Biden reelection effort and the Democrat Party were provided with interns … to enhance the party’s prospects of winning elections.”
The Trump administration rescinded Biden’s guidance on Aug. 19, according to a press release by the Department of Education (ED).
The new guidance prohibits work-study jobs that involve “any partisan or nonpartisan political activity.”
[RELATED: Biden’s Indifference to Foreign Influence is Affecting the Education Department Too]
The ED told higher education institutions that they “must have proper controls in place to avoid employing students in FWS jobs where they engage in any political activity or in work that serves the interests of a particular group.”
Additionally, while institutions under the Higher Education Act are required to make a “good faith effort” to distribute voter registration forms to students, they also have a duty to ensure said students are “eligible voters,” the department stated in its guidance.
von Spakovsky, a former Federal Election Commission member, told the Fix in a recent email that the government shouldn’t engage in “any type of voter registration activity” because it’s “inevitable” that any such activity will eventually be aimed at aiding “the political party in power.”
“There is too much danger of individuals who depend on government benefits and resources being intimidated and thinking that they must support the political party in power or risk losing such benefits and resources,” Spakovsky said.
When asked what this decision could signal about the direction the Trump administration is taking the ED, he told the Fix that it is trying to “rid” the department of “partisan politics and bring it back within its legal statutory authority.”
The work-study program should focus on “furthering educational opportunities” rather than “help[ing] the election prospects of the political party in power,” he said.
The federal, taxpayer-funded program provides paid jobs to low-income students as a way to help pay for their college tuition.
Last year, the Biden administration changed the program to allow election-related jobs. The guidelines stated the jobs must be nonpartisan and “not associated with a particular interest or group,” but the Fix found evidence otherwise.
For example, Penn State University listed a job requiring a commitment to “equity and inclusion” and “anti-racist practices” with the progressive League of Women Voters. The university took down the job post following the Fix’s initial coverage of the situation.
Other election work-study jobs focused on “social justice” and equity were advertised at the University of Washington and Pacific University last fall, prompting criticism from Republican leaders, including U.S. Rep. Burgess Owens, then-chair of the Higher Education and Workforce Development subcommittee.
Logan Churchwell, research director for the Public Interest Legal Foundation, praised the Trump administration for ending these jobs. His organization specializes in election integrity issues.
Churchwell called the move “real democracy protection in action” in a recent email to the Fix. The federal government shouldn’t grant funds to institutions with “deep” histories of supporting “one-sided” get-out-the-vote efforts, he said.
[RELATED: Biden-Harris Funneled Tax Cash to Illegals’ Education—Trump ED Says Citizens First]
When asked about the impact of the decision, Churchwell told the Fix that the admin’s efforts appear to highlight a “concerted attempt to defund the left.”
The Fix also contacted the American Association of Colleges and Universities, which supported the Biden administration’s guidance, and the Brennan Center for Justice, a progressive organization that believes “false claims of fraud are driving attempts to interfere with the counting of votes and certification of election results.” Neither responded to emails asking for comment on the Trump admin’s decision.
However, AACU president Lynn Pasquerella criticized the change as a “most troubling” contribution to the “erosion of the public purpose of higher education” in a recent statement to Spectrum News.
“The disallowing of federal funds for nonpartisan activities to promote civic engagement undermines the strength of American higher education and our democracy,” Pasquerella stated.
Image: “Department of Education sign Washington DC” by G. Edward Johnson on Wikimedia Commons
What colleges also do sometimes is offer academic credit for political work, e.g.going door-to-door in New Hampshire for a candidate.