Education Department faces FOIA lawsuit over alleged scheme to pay students for election activity
- March 13, 2024
Madeleine Hubbard, Just The News
The watchdog Protect the Public’s Trust filed a lawsuit on Wednesday against the Education Department for allegedly not responding to a Freedom of Information Act request for documents about the agency’s decision to allow federal work-study program funds to be used to pay students participating in election-related activities.
The watchdog filed the lawsuit after a year and a half after it first attempted to obtain documents from the Education Department about the work-study program, which provides part-time jobs for undergraduate and graduate students with financial need.
In April 2022, the Education Department said that federal work-study funds could not be used by any agency other than a post-secondary education “institution, for work involving partisan or nonpartisan political activity, including party-affiliated voter registration activities.”
Last month, however, the federal agency said that federal work-study funds “may be used for employment by a Federal, State, local, or Tribal public agency for civic engagement work that is not associated with a particular interest or group,” including “broad-based get-out-the-vote activities, voter registration, providing voter assistance at a polling place or through a voter hotline, or serving as a poll worker.”
The watchdog’s director, Michael Chamberlain, said the lack of response followed by a new decision is a “bad look” for the department.
“Trust in government is at an all-time low. If it’s going to be restored, citizens must be certain that the bureaucracy works for them, and not for political purposes,” he said.