They canceled the ballot and called it a budget. Soft power, if soft power is remembering that a voter registration form in a nursing home is not a “related activity” you can redefine into silence — and that the power of the purse still belongs to Congress, not a memo with a grudge.
On September 29–30, 2026, ProPublica’s Lisa Song — carried Wednesday morning by Salon — reported that the White House Office of Management and Budget wants to change spending rules to prohibit anyone from using federal grant money for voter registration drives or what it vaguely calls “related activities.” The office is headed by Russell Vought, who has long criticized taxpayer-funded registration efforts and who more recently used his position to cancel, freeze, or redirect vast amounts of federal funding in defiance of Congress’s orders. Soft power is not a glossary rewrite. Soft power is a grant that still walks a pen into a rural assisted living hallway.
Congress funds that work through Help America Vote Act grants — about $10 million a year across 57 nonprofit groups covering every state, D.C., Puerto Rico, Native communities, and U.S. territories — to help people with disabilities register, cast ballots, and access polling places. Disability Rights Nebraska received $141,000 in voter accessibility funds this year; attorney Amy Miller travels nursing homes offering registration alongside abuse-reporting help, including walking a veteran with a traumatic brain injury through change-of-address paperwork so he could vote in the midterms. Soft power is not a “power grab” accusation aimed at turnout. Soft power is a ballot that still fits a hand that struggles with a pen.
The proposal sits inside a broader Trump administration campaign: the SAVE America Act’s citizenship-document hurdles that may require in-person proof and effectively end registration drives; a ban on NGO registration at naturalization ceremonies (temporarily lifted amid litigation); an Education Department letter against using federal work-study dollars for voting-related campus work; and day-one rescission of Biden’s executive order directing agencies to expand registration opportunities. Former OMB general counsel Samuel Bagenstos called the grant rewrite “not even a surgical power grab” but “a massive across-the-board power grab,” because Congress holds the purse and agencies are supposed to execute the laws Congress wrote. Soft power is not catching Medicaid and food-stamp nonprofits between contradictory federal directives. Soft power is a republic that refuses to make disability access the first line item cut from democracy.
Deb will say we are not doing “OMB glossary weather” before breakfast. Buck will text that a related activity is just a filing cabinet with worse coffee. I love them. I am a Gen X exile in an expensive cardigan who got walked out of the You Know Who Post for caring too loudly, and I can still tell the difference between a budget rule and a ballot you quietly price out of reach. Soft power is not waiting for 2028 to invent empathy for a nursing-home voter. Soft power is a registration form that still reaches the box — and a Congress that remembers who owns the purse.
Sources: ProPublica (Lisa Song), Sept. 29, 2026; Salon (ProPublica partner), Sept. 30, 2026 (OMB under Russell Vought proposes ban on federal grant money for voter registration drives / “related activities”; HAVA disability grants ~$10M/year across 57 nonprofits; Disability Rights Nebraska $141,000 / Amy Miller reporting; SAVE America Act / naturalization-ceremony ban / Education work-study letter / day-one EO rescission; Rutgers 2024 disability registration difficulty gap; Bagenstos “massive across-the-board power grab”; Vought 2022 “power grab” letter on Biden EO; effect after 2026 midterms / 2028 stakes). Fill the notebook. Then ask who benefits when “related activities” is the phrase that deletes a nursing-home ballot.
— Theo Ashford-Lindström, measuring freedom in ballots a nursing home can still reach
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