While federal electoral reform legislation languishes in Congress, the executive branch is taking small but significant steps toward promoting access to the ballot box.
In March, President Biden issued an executive order asking federal agencies to evaluate how they can, within their purview of the law, encourage voter registration and participation. The deadline for agencies to submit their proposals was Sept. 23, and this week the White House announced the first set of plans.
Here's how 14 federal departments and agencies plan to promote voter participation and access:
- The Agriculture Department will facilitate voting information for Americans living in rural areas who interact with their services.
- The Department of Defense will provide comprehensive election information in multiple languages, particularly about mail voting, to military service members and civilians stationed away from home or overseas.
- The Department of Education will create a toolkit containing civic education resources and strategies for K-12 and higher education institutions.
- The General Services Administration will update vote.gov, the federal voter registration portal, to be more user-friendly for all Americans.
- The Department of Health and Human Services' Administration for Community Living will establish a new voting information hub for older Americans and disabled individuals. The Indian Health Service will assist patients with voter registration. And Biden's budget calls for a 25 percent increase in grants for services that will help people with disabilities fully participate in the electoral process.
- The Department of Homeland Security will encourage state and local governments, as well as nonprofit organizations, to register the hundreds of thousands of individuals who become naturalized citizens each year and provide these new citizens with voting information. DHA will also provide voting information and resources to those impacted by natural disasters or other emergencies.
- The Department of Housing and Urban Development will instruct 3,000 public housing authorities that manage 1.2 million units to provide voter registration information to residents. The department will also work to improve voting access for people experiencing homelessness.
- The Institute of Museum and Library Services will create and promote a civic engagement toolkit that libraries, museums, and heritage and cultural institutions can use.
- The Department of the Interior will share voter registration information with schools operated by the Bureau of Indian Education and tribal colleges and universities, serving about 30,000 students. The department will also promote tribal colleges and universities as voter registration agencies.
- The Justice Department has created an online resource with state-specific registration and voting information, details on federal voting rights laws and instructions on how to report potential voting rights violations. DOJ will also provide voting information to people in federal custody and facilitate voting for those still eligible.
- The Department of Labor will encourage states to make the more than 2,400 American Job Centers across all 50 states official voter registration agencies.
- The Department of Transportation will issue guidance to more than 1,150 rural public transit systems and more than 1,000 urban public transit systems to consider providing free and reduced fare service on Election Day and distributing voting information in stations. The department will also work to mitigate traffic and construction that impacts routes to the polls, particularly in underserved communities.
- The Treasury Department will include voting information in its direct deposit campaigns for Americans who receive Social Security, Veterans Affairs and other federal benefit payments.
- The Department of Veterans Affairs will provide voting information and assistance to medical center patients and residents of nursing homes and treatment centers.
More initiatives from federal agencies will be rolled out in the coming months.
Before the agencies submitted their plans to the White House, the Campaign Legal Center outlined recommendations and best practices for promoting voter access.
Demos, a progressive think tank that advocates for democracy reform, celebrated this step forward, while also pushing for further action from the federal government.
"The actions outlined today are a good start and, with additional consultation, creative thinking, and commitments, have the potential to transform how and where people register to vote all across America. This is especially significant in Black, brown and low-income communities, where we see notably lower rates of voter registration," said Laura Williamson, senior policy analyst at Demos.
When announcing these plans for promoting electoral participation, Vice President Harris also emphasized the importance of Congress passing the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. However, with the filibuster still intact, both bills have a slim chance of success in the Senate.
"Our nation and democracy are stronger when everyone participates, and weaker when anyone is left out," Harris said. "The president and I will help ensure these plans are fully implemented, and we will continue to work closely with these agencies to bring a whole-of-government approach to making voting accessible for all Americans."
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.