(DCNF)—Several federal agencies have used an executive order signed by President Joe Biden to mobilize demographics who typically favor the Democratic Party ahead of election day, spending taxpayer dollars in the process.
Biden signed Executive Order 14019 in March 2021, directing all federal agencies to evaluate ways in which they can promote voter registration and voter participation. Since then, a number of federal agencies have used Biden’s order to direct federal funds toward boosting turnout among groups that have historically opposed Republicans including Native Americans, college students, newly naturalized immigrants and federal employees. Additionally, multiple agencies have partnered with left-of-center activist groups to implement their voter mobilization plans.
“Federal resources should not be used to help any political party or its candidates in the election arena,” Heritage Foundation senior legal fellow Hans von Spakovsky wrote in August. “That is an abuse of our governmental structure that is reminiscent of third-world dictatorships. The states should act to stop what amounts to unlawful, partisan interference by executive branch agencies in the administration of elections and the voting and registration process.”
In his executive order, Biden specifically emphasized that the administration would work to increase “voter outreach, education, registration and turnout” among Native American voters. Fifty-six percent of Native Americans said they planned to vote for Democratic candidates, compared to just 40% who supported Republicans, according to a poll conducted shortly before the 2022 midterm elections. Democratic political committees have poured considerable funds into turning out Native voters and some have attributed Biden’s 2020 victory in Arizona to Natives.
Department of the Interior (DOI) Secretary Deb Haaland, for instance, used Biden’s executive order to establish voter registration centers at two Native American universities and then went on to write an essay about it urging Natives to vote, documents obtained by the Heritage Foundation via Freedom of Information (FOIA) request show.
“Your voice and your vote can make a difference,” Haaland’s essay reads. “There are places in this country where Native votes can turn the tables and drive our country toward progress.”
Strong turnout among Native Americans in Arizona contributed to Biden’s victory in the state during the 2020 presidential election, the Associated Press reported.
Other agencies, like the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Department of Labor (DOL), have also pushed to increase Native turnout in order to comply with Biden’s order.
HHS, through its Indian Health Service program serving about 2.8 million American Indians, has designated multiple of its facilities in Arizona and New Mexico as voter registration agencies, according to a press release. DOL, meanwhile, has authorized its partners serving Native American communities to engage in voter registration efforts.
College students are another demographic that both the Democratic Party and the federal government are intent on turning out ahead of Tuesday’s election. Vice President Kamala Harris leads former President Donald Trump by 38 points among college students, according to an Inside Higher Ed/Generation Lab poll released in October.
In February, the Department of Education (ED) announced that the federal work study program, which provides federal funds to fund employment for low-income students, would be expanded to include work for voter registration organizations. One such job posting at Pennsylvania State University with the League of Women Voters, a pro-abortion organization that typically supports Democrats, called for students to “support the registration and education of community voters” while engaging in “anti-racism practices.”
The website for federal college student aid also directs visitors to voter registration resources, an inclusion the agency notes was made in accordance with Executive Order 14019.
Federal employees, another constituency that strongly supports the Democratic Party, are also set to be major beneficiaries of Executive Order 14019. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) announced in March 2022 that, to comply with Biden’s executive order, federal workers would be entitled to paid time off to vote in elections.
Federal employees have donated $4.2 million this election cycle, with 84% of their presidential donations going to Harris, Government Executive reported. Not all federal employees are located in the nation’s capital, with many living in Maryland and Virginia, as well as near field offices in other states.
To develop voter mobilization plans, federal agencies collaborated with multiple left-of-center organizations. Among them was Demos, a group that has received millions from the Soros family’s philanthropic network and is aligned with the Democratic Party.
DOL, USDA and DOI all discussed voter mobilization plans with Demos, according to documents obtained via FOIA request by the Heritage Foundation. Demos opposed policies pushed by Trump during his first term, the then-president of the organization testified against the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court in 2017 and the group has worked to build support for the Democratic Party’s agenda, according to Influence Watch.
Additional agencies that launched voter mobilization campaigns targeting left-leaning demographics included the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) seeking to boost turnout among newly naturalized immigrants, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) publishing voter information material in languages other than English and HHS monitoring whether its voter mobilization campaigns were targeting racial minorities while working to register low-income people on Obamacare.
EEOC told the Daily Caller News Foundation that its work has been “in compliance with the [executive order].”
Not all the voter mobilization efforts advanced by the Biden administration target pro-Democratic demographics. The Department of Transportation (DOT), for instance, worked to analyze traffic patterns to figure out how to make getting to polling locations easier and encouraged local transit agencies to be proactive about managing work zones to ensure easy access to voting centers.
Some of the Biden administration’s voter mobilization efforts even targeted traditionally conservative voting demographics, like the Small Business Administration‘s (SBA) effort to turn out small business owners and the Department of Veterans Affairs‘ (VA) work to get veterans to the polls.
Conservatives, however, have raised concerns about these initiatives as well.
The America First Policy Institute, for instance, demanded information about the SBA’s voter registration activities in Michigan in July after noticing that the distribution of federal resources for the campaign could benefit Democrats.
“There is evidence to suggest that the SBA’s largest presence is in the Michigan counties with the highest concentrations of registered Democrat voters, while at the same time it is least active in the Michigan counties with the highest concentrations of small businesses and registered Republican voters per capita,” AFPI executive director for litigation Mike Berry previously told the DCNF.
The VA, meanwhile, adopted an equity action plan in June 2023 in which it stressed its focus on increasing outreach to minority, LGBT and Native American veterans — all groups that tend to favor the Democratic Party.
“What they have done is weaponize all federal agencies on behalf of President Biden’s reelection campaign,” Republican Wisconsin Rep. Bryan Steil, chair of the House Administration Committee, said in May of Biden’s voter registration executive order. “As we see the actions taken by this administration to leverage taxpayer dollars for political purposes, that should be concerning to all citizens.”
OPM, HHS, USDA, DOL, SBA, ED, VA, DOT and DHS did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
