President Donald Trump fired the last two Democratic members of the Election Assistance Commission and accepted the resignation of its lone Republican commissioner, leaving the federal agency with no sitting members just months before the 2026 midterm elections.
The removals, Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland, both selected by congressional Democrats, came by email, the New York Post reported. Republican commissioner Christy McCormick resigned, and the White House accepted her departure. A fourth commissioner, Republican Donald Palmer, had already resigned in late April, meaning all four seats now sit empty.
The White House framed the move as part of a broader effort to secure the integrity of federal elections. An unnamed official said Trump "reserves the right to remove individuals that may not be totally aligned with the important task of securing America's elections and ensuring every legal vote is counted."
The firings followed a 6-3 Supreme Court decision on June 29, referred to as the "Slaughter decision", that upheld the president's authority to remove members of independent federal agencies without cause. The White House cited that ruling as the legal foundation for the EAC removals, Just the News reported.
Before that ruling, presidents faced legal constraints on firing members of independent boards and commissions. The Supreme Court's decision overturned longstanding precedents restricting presidential removal power, giving Trump far wider latitude to reshape the federal bureaucracy.
The EAC action fits a pattern. The Trump administration has moved aggressively to remove officials across independent agencies and oversight bodies, a campaign that has drawn both praise from supporters who see bloated government being trimmed and criticism from opponents who see institutional guardrails being dismantled. Earlier this year, the administration terminated National Science Board members in a similar federal personnel shakeup.
The Election Assistance Commission was established by the Help America Vote Act of 2002. It serves as a national clearinghouse for election administration, certifies voting systems, maintains the national mail voter registration form, and distributes grants to state and local election offices.
With zero commissioners, the agency cannot lawfully make major decisions affecting how Americans vote. AP News reported that leaving the positions vacant could prevent the EAC from distributing grants to state and local election offices and complicate oversight of voting system certification ahead of the midterms.
Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center for Justice put it bluntly, as quoted by Breitbart:
"Until bipartisan replacements are confirmed, the agency cannot lawfully make any decisions that affect how Americans vote."
That may be precisely the point. The EAC had been at the center of a standoff with the White House over voter registration requirements. Last year, Trump issued an executive order directing the commission to require government-issued proof of U.S. citizenship for anyone registering to vote in federal elections. The order also directed state and local officials to verify citizenship information and count ballots by Election Day.
A judge blocked the order, ruling Trump exceeded his authority. The commission's resistance to the citizenship-verification push appears to have set the stage for the removals.
Congressional Democrats wasted no time casting the firings as an assault on election integrity. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called the move a direct threat:
"Firing every remaining member of the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission months before the midterms is a brazen attempt to seize control of our elections before a single vote is cast."
Sen. Alex Padilla and Rep. Joe Morelle issued a joint statement saying Trump "is trying to dismantle yet another independent guardrail of our democracy designed to keep elections fair and secure." Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia said the dismissals "should concern every American, regardless of party."
The rhetoric is predictable, but the underlying question is fair: what comes next? The White House has not publicly indicated whether it plans to nominate replacements, or on what timeline. The EAC requires Senate-confirmed commissioners to function. Without them, the agency is effectively frozen, unable to certify voting machines, issue guidance, or send money to the states that run elections.
That freeze carries real consequences in an election year. Whether those consequences are a feature or a bug depends on where you sit.
The EAC firings did not happen in isolation. Trump has moved to reshape or remove officials at multiple independent agencies since taking office. The most prominent earlier example involved Federal Election Commission Chairwoman Ellen Weintraub, who received a White House letter dated January 31, 2025, stating she was "hereby removed as a Member of the Federal Election Commission, effective immediately."
Weintraub publicly contested the legality of her dismissal. As Fox News reported, she posted on social media: "There's a legal way to replace FEC commissioners, this isn't it." The Washington Examiner noted that Trump had also fired more than a dozen inspectors general within his first week in office, actions that drew bipartisan congressional concern at the time.
The June 29 Supreme Court ruling changed the legal landscape. Before that decision, officials like Weintraub could plausibly argue that statutory protections shielded them from at-will removal. After it, the president's hand is far stronger. The EAC firings are the first major test of that new authority in the election-administration space.
The administration's willingness to clear out federal boards and commissions has drawn comparisons to other abrupt government personnel actions. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz recently ousted his own DHS commissioner just before a confirmation hearing amid fraud scrutiny, a reminder that sudden high-profile terminations are not unique to the federal level or to one party.
Strip away the procedural drama and the core dispute is straightforward. Trump wants voters to prove they are U.S. citizens before registering to vote in federal elections. His executive order directed the EAC to make that happen. The EAC, backed by a federal judge, said no.
Now the EAC has no members. The executive order remains blocked. And the midterms are approaching.
For conservative voters, the frustration is real. Requiring proof of citizenship to vote is not a radical proposition, it is common sense supported by large majorities of Americans in poll after poll. Yet the institutional machinery of Washington has treated it as an extraordinary overreach. A federal commission resisted. A judge blocked the order. And the same critics now lamenting the commission's emptiness spent months defending its refusal to act.
Democrats frame the EAC as a "guardrail." But guardrails that only prevent movement in one direction look a lot like roadblocks. The commission's resistance to basic citizenship verification, a measure that most democracies around the world treat as routine, raises a fair question about whose interests the agency was actually guarding.
Meanwhile, House Democrats have been busy introducing impeachment articles against Defense Secretary Hegseth with no realistic path to passage, suggesting that the opposition's energy is focused more on political theater than on solving the substantive policy disagreements at the heart of these fights.
Several important questions remain. Will the White House nominate new EAC commissioners, and if so, when? Will those nominees require Senate confirmation before the midterms? Can the agency's career staff continue routine operations, processing state requests, maintaining voter registration forms, without commissioners in place?
And perhaps most consequentially: will the administration find another legal path to require proof of citizenship for voter registration, now that the executive order route has been blocked by the courts?
Congressional action on Trump-related legislative matters continues to move through the House, but election-administration reform has not yet emerged as a priority on the Republican side of the aisle. If the goal is citizenship verification, the path forward likely runs through Congress, not through an emptied-out commission.
The EAC's defenders will spend the next several months warning that American elections are in danger because the commission has no members. They will have less to say about why the commission spent its final months blocking a common-sense measure to verify that only citizens are registering to vote.
An agency that refuses to do the job the American people want done is not a guardrail. It is an obstacle. And the president, armed with a Supreme Court ruling, removed it.
Whether Washington fills those seats with commissioners who will actually secure the vote, or leaves them empty as a political football, will tell voters everything they need to know about who is serious about election integrity and who is just serious about keeping power.