You may soon need a passport to vote. Trump is making it harder to get one.
Have you been feeling like you need to rush to get a passport in case the SAVE Act voter suppression jamboree becomes law? What if, somehow, President Donald Trump signing a piece of paper means that the provisions of the SAVE Act go into effect even without legislation?
Well, good luck scoring that passport in time.
In what is a nakedly transparent move, even for this administration, the State Department announced that it is just straight-up making it harder to get a passport. Nonprofit libraries were just informed that they can no longer process passport applications.
Though the administration teed this up last November when it began sending cease-and-desist letters to nonprofit libraries, it didn’t bring the hammer down nationwide until last week.
Oh, and it’s already in effect as of February 13, 2026.
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It sure looks a lot like this is being done with the hopes that either the SAVE Act passes or Trump’s big cool conservative friends on the Supreme Court bless Trump’s assertion that he can just singlehandedly impose a voter ID requirement nationwide.
How is the administration justifying this? Well, like so many things—birthright citizenship, sending the military into cities, firing everyone at independent agencies—the administration has decided that decades of settled law and regulations have simply been interpreted by the courts and Congress wrongly all this time. According to the State Department, they’ve suddenly discovered that an obscure 1920 law forms the basis for prohibiting nonprofit libraries from issuing passports.
There’s no explanation as to why, even if the State Department’s novel interpretation had any merit, this had to be rushed through. There’s also no explanation as to why the State Department has repeatedly reviewed, approved, and reauthorized nonprofit libraries to process passport applications in the past, only now discovering it is super-illegal.
Government-run libraries are not affected by this announcement, so if your library is run by the county or the city, for example, you’re in luck. Nonprofit libraries are independently run and, gosh, whaddya know? They are most common in Northeastern states: Connecticut, Maine, New York, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island.
Huh. It’s probably just a coincidence that this would disproportionately affect blue states, right?
Roughly 21 million people lack access to the additional documents required to comply with SAVE’s requirements. Driver’s licenses aren’t enough, so people need an additional document like a birth certificate or, you guessed it, a passport. No surprise the administration thus wants to make passports harder to obtain.
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You also won’t be surprised that the State Department is lying about the scope of this, saying it only affects “less than one percent of our total network” of 7,500 passport processing facilities. However, the American Library Association—which, let’s face it, is going to be far more reliable here than the administration—says it affects about 1,400 nonprofit libraries, a good deal more than 1%.
While this move is no doubt part of an overall voter suppression plan, it’s also part of the administration’s overall attack on libraries. A public service open to everyone? With books about everything? That provides additional support and services to a community? Well, we can’t have that.
At the start of his second term. Trump tried to kill the Institute of Museum and Library Services, firing the board members, placing nearly all staff on administrative leave, and cutting off grants for libraries nationwide. States had to sue to restore the funding, and a court ordered the administration to reinstate the grants last November. IMLS grants are the primary source of federal funding for state libraries, providing about $160 million each year, representing about one-third to one-half of library budgets.
Barring nonprofit libraries from offering passport services is also a financial hit. In Connecticut, for example, one library processed almost 8,000 applications in the last year and received just under $200,000 for those services.
Finally, eliminating nonprofit libraries makes it more likely that people will have to go to government-run offices to get passports. Naturalized citizens are entitled to vote and entitled to a United States passport. However, the administration desperately wants to strip citizenship from naturalized citizens. Where doing so has been quite rare in the past, the administration is shooting for 100-200 of these per month. Sure would be nice and convenient to be able to snatch people up right from the passport line, right?
And given that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been given the authority to racially profile people and detain them if ICE decides their proof of citizenship just isn’t valid, based on vibes, it’s likely that plenty of people will just choose not to get a passport at a government-run office.
Nonprofit libraries, on the other hand, often have longer hours, have a space for children to stay occupied during a parent or caregiver’s application process, and assist with language barriers. In short, they make it much safer and easier for people with less means to get a passport, and that’s exactly what the administration seeks to prevent.
It’s tempting to fall back on saying this is a nonstarter because elections are run by the states, and the Supreme Court will not agree that a random executive order is suddenly the law nationwide, but the Supreme Court has been asleep at the wheel when it comes to curbing Trump’s excesses. And of course, the court’s conservatives are also extremely into voter suppression.
Isn’t it fun that the very foundations of American democracy are now based on the whims of the very worst people?
