The Trump administration wants to stop federal grant money from being used to help people register to vote. The people who would feel it first are some of the hardest Americans to reach: veterans with brain injuries, nursing home residents, and people with disabilities in towns without a library or a gas station.

In May, the White House Office of Management and Budget proposed new spending rules that would prohibit anyone from using federal grant money for voter registration drives — or for what it vaguely calls "related activities." ProPublica reported this week on who that would hurt.

Congress has paid for this since 2002

After the 2000 Florida recount, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, and President George W. Bush signed it. One piece of it created grants to help people with disabilities register, cast their ballots and get into polling places.

That money still flows. In recent years Congress has budgeted $10 million a year, split among 57 nonprofit groups covering every state, plus Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, Native American communities and the U.S. territories.

A 2024 Rutgers University report written for the federal Election Assistance Commission found the voting gap between people with and without disabilities has narrowed since the law passed. But the gap is still there: in 2024, 3.6% of registered voters with disabilities reported trouble registering, compared to 1.4% of those without. One of the Rutgers researchers told ProPublica that difference represents about 740,000 voters with disabilities.

What this looks like in real life

ProPublica followed Amy Miller, an attorney for Disability Rights Nebraska. She travels the state checking on nursing homes and assisted living facilities, and she brings voter registration forms. Last month she helped a veteran with a traumatic brain injury fill out a change-of-address form so he could vote this fall. "He 100% knew who he wanted to vote for," she said. He just had trouble writing with a pen.

At one rural facility, a young man pointed at a poster about voting rights for people with disabilities and asked her, "Is this true?" He'd lived there for a couple of years. Nobody had ever offered to help him register.

Her group got $141,000 in voter accessibility money this year. It is required by law to be nonpartisan, and Miller's staff work in pairs from different parties. In its public comment against the rule, the group said that on one June visit to a rural facility, 30% of the new voters it registered chose Republican, 20% Democrat, 30% nonpartisan and 20% a third party.

"Shutting that down and making it more difficult for these Americans to access the ballot box is bewildering to me," Miller said.

The man behind it

The budget office is run by Russell Vought, who has long criticized the use of taxpayer money to register voters. In a 2022 letter to state officials, he called a Biden order directing federal agencies to expand registration a "power grab" that would "increase voter registration and turnout, especially among Democratic Party supporters."

That's the tell. His complaint wasn't fraud. It was that more people would vote, and that too many of them would be Democrats.

Trump revoked that Biden order on his first day back in office. Vought has since used his office to cancel, freeze or redirect huge amounts of federal money in defiance of Congress. Now he wants to override a grant program Congress wrote into law and has funded for more than 20 years.

Samuel Bagenstos, who was the budget office's top lawyer for part of the Biden administration, told ProPublica the rule ignores Congress's constitutional "power of the purse." "This is not even a surgical power grab," he said. "It's just a massive across-the-board power grab."

Neither Vought nor his office answered ProPublica's questions.

It reaches far beyond disability groups

The rule wouldn't take effect until after this November's midterms. But it would be in place for the 2028 presidential election.

And it would reach well past disability groups. Under the National Voter Registration Act, groups that get federal money to help people sign up for Medicaid, food stamps and other programs covered by that law are required to offer voter registration. If the ban is finalized, they'd be caught between two federal orders that contradict each other. Thousands of other nonprofits that do voter outreach with private donations could pull back too, nonprofit experts told ProPublica, just to avoid having to prove they're in compliance. Colleges that help students register away from home could be hit as well.

"I don't really think this rule had in mind that we are going to disenfranchise voters with disabilities. But it's going to have that kind of effect," Stanford law professor Rabia Belt told ProPublica.

Part of a pattern

This is one piece of a broader push, ProPublica reported, against federal efforts to widen access to voting:

• The administration banned outside groups from running registration drives at naturalization ceremonies, then temporarily lifted the ban during a lawsuit.
• The Education Department told colleges they couldn't use federal work-study money to pay students to register voters.
• Trump has championed the SAVE America Act, which would require documents proving citizenship to register — the same requirement that, as we've reported on the original SAVE Act, could keep millions of eligible citizens from voting.
• This summer, Trump's Medicare agency deleted the federal guidance telling nursing homes to help residents vote.

Put those together and the same people keep getting squeezed: the elderly, the disabled, new citizens, students.

What we know

The White House budget office, run by Russell Vought, has proposed banning the use of federal grant money for voter registration drives and "related activities." Congress has funded voter access grants for people with disabilities since 2002 — $10 million a year across 57 groups — and people with disabilities still report trouble registering at more than twice the rate of other voters. Vought has criticized that kind of spending because it would raise turnout. The rule would take effect after the 2026 midterms and before the 2028 election.

Source

“A Massive Power Grab”: White House Proposal Threatens Funding That Helps Disabled Americans Vote — ProPublica, September 29, 2026.