President Donald Trump removed the two remaining Democratic members of the Election Assistance Commission on Friday, completing a sweep that leaves the obscure but consequential federal agency entirely vacant months before the 2026 midterm elections. Republican member Christy McCormick resigned the same day, and a fourth Republican commissioner, Donald Palmer, had already departed voluntarily earlier in the year.
The White House made no apologies. It framed the move as a straightforward exercise of executive power, grounded in a recent Supreme Court ruling and aimed at an agency that had refused to cooperate with the administration's election-integrity agenda.
The action strips the EAC, a bipartisan body created by Congress in 2002 to distribute federal election grants, oversee voting-system testing, and maintain the national voter registration form, of every sitting commissioner. Without a quorum, the agency cannot approve new grants to state and local election offices or certify voting equipment ahead of November 2026. Democrats called it a power grab. The White House called it accountability.
Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland, the commission's two Democratic members, were notified of their removal by email. The emails were signed by Morgan DeWitt Snow, deputy director of presidential personnel in the Executive Office of the President, as the Associated Press reported, citing election news outlet VoteBeat, which broke the story.
Hicks had been appointed by President Barack Obama. Hovland was originally appointed by Trump himself during his first term. McCormick, the lone Republican, was also an Obama appointee. Her resignation, rather than a firing, left the commission entirely empty without the White House needing to remove all four members by force.
The Just The News report on the firings confirmed that the White House cited recent Supreme Court rulings as legal justification, framing the removals as consistent with the president's authority over independent regulators.
The White House leaned heavily on the Supreme Court's 6, 3 ruling in the Slaughter case, decided last month, which held that the president has wide executive authority to fire political appointees of independent executive agencies. The court's six conservative justices concluded that previous restrictions on presidential removal power violated the Constitution's separation of powers.
Trump had fired former Federal Trade Commission member Rebecca Slaughter without cause, despite a federal statute requiring a reason and a nearly century-old Supreme Court precedent that had insulated independent agency heads from presidential removal at will. The high court swept those protections aside.
The White House statement to the AP was direct: "The President, and head of the Executive Branch, 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 Slaughter decision gives the President precedence to do so."
The Slaughter ruling has given the administration a template. Trump has also fired members of the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit Systems Protection Board, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, all moves that would have faced immediate legal challenge before the court's decision. The pattern extends beyond regulatory agencies; Trump recently approved a plan to remove FDA Commissioner Marty Makary after clashes over policy direction.
The court did draw one line. In the separate case involving Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook, a 5, 4 majority ruled the president could not fire Fed governors without cause. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh sided with the court's three liberals, citing the central bank's unique congressionally chartered structure and the importance of its "appearance of independence."
That distinction matters. The EAC is not the Federal Reserve. It is a small commission with a narrow mandate, and the Slaughter precedent appears to cover it cleanly.
Congress created the Election Assistance Commission through the Help America Vote Act, signed by President George W. Bush in 2002. The law requires the commission to include two Democrats and two Republicans, all nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. The agency's core functions include distributing federal grants to help states and localities run elections, overseeing the testing and certification of voting systems, and maintaining the national voter registration form.
That last function is what put the EAC in the administration's crosshairs. In March 2025, Trump signed an executive order directing that the national voter registration form require documentation of U.S. citizenship, not merely the checkbox attestation the form currently uses. The EAC declined to make the change.
A federal judge subsequently blocked the executive order, ruling it exceeded the president's authority because the Constitution grants elections management and oversight to Congress and the states. The administration has indicated it will appeal.
With the commission now empty, the agency cannot move forward on grants, certifications, or form changes. Breitbart noted 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, a real operational concern regardless of one's view of the firings.
The EAC staff did not immediately respond to a request for comment about agency operations going forward.
Sen. Alex Padilla of California, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Rules Committee, and Rep. Joe Morelle of New York, ranking member of the House Administration Committee, issued a joint statement:
"Purging commissioners just months before the midterm elections and further gutting support for our state and local elections officials is a blatant part of his plan to politicize our elections and enable more unlawful and dangerous election interference."
Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer went further, as the Washington Times reported: "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."
The rhetoric is familiar. Democrats have described nearly every Trump personnel decision as an assault on democratic norms, a reflex that has become so routine it risks losing whatever force it once carried. The pattern repeats across policy areas, from immigration enforcement to agency staffing, with the same language of crisis deployed regardless of scale.
But the substance of the Democratic complaint deserves scrutiny on its own terms. The EAC is a creature of statute. Its commissioners require Senate confirmation. If Trump wants new members who share his priorities on election security, he can nominate them and send them to the Senate. The question is whether he will, or whether the administration prefers an empty commission that cannot act at all.
The EAC firings do not exist in a vacuum. The administration has pursued an aggressive, multi-front campaign on election integrity. Trump launched an investigation of his 2020 election loss. He signed two executive orders aimed at reshaping voting rules. Courts have blocked most of those orders. And this week, the administration threatened states that do not try to purge what federal officials believe are noncitizens from their voter rolls.
The citizenship-documentation requirement is the centerpiece. Requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration polls well with the public and addresses a straightforward concern: that only citizens should vote in federal elections. The legal obstacles are real, the federal judge's ruling that the executive order exceeded presidential authority is a serious check, but the policy goal itself is neither radical nor unreasonable.
David Becker, a former Department of Justice attorney who runs the Center for Election Innovation & Research, offered a more measured take than most partisans. He wrote on BlueSky Friday morning: "This doesn't really change anything about how our elections will be run, and how states are successfully ensuring secure, convenient, safe elections."
That assessment may prove too sanguine if the EAC remains empty through the fall. States rely on the commission's grant money and its voting-system certifications. But Becker's core point stands: elections are run by states and localities, not by a four-person federal commission. The EAC matters at the margins. It is not the load-bearing wall of American democracy that Schumer's rhetoric implies.
The removed commissioners could challenge their dismissals in court, though the Slaughter precedent makes that an uphill fight. The Help America Vote Act's requirement for Senate-confirmed commissioners means Trump cannot simply install replacements by fiat. Any new nominees will face the confirmation process, and with it, the political leverage of whichever party controls the Senate calendar.
The deeper question is strategic. Does the administration want a functioning EAC staffed with commissioners who will pursue citizenship verification and tighter election standards? Or does it prefer to leave the agency sidelined, denying it the ability to act on anything, including the grant distributions and system certifications that states need? The decision to empty the commission entirely raises that question sharply.
The Fox News report on the earlier firing of FEC Commissioner Ellen Weintraub, who was removed in January 2025 and publicly contested the legality of her dismissal, shows the pattern is not limited to the EAC. Across multiple agencies, Trump has moved to clear out holdover appointees who resisted his agenda. The Supreme Court has now given him the legal room to do it.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party's internal fractures continue to complicate its response. The collapse of traditional party unity in states like Pennsylvania suggests that the outrage machine in Washington may not translate into the kind of organized opposition that could block Trump's nominees or force a reversal.
Trump had the legal authority to fire these commissioners. The Supreme Court said so. The EAC had resisted his election-security directives. The White House acted.
The real test is not whether the firings were lawful. It is whether the administration follows through by nominating commissioners who will actually advance the cause of election integrity, or whether it settles for an empty agency and the political convenience of having no one to say no.
A president who wants secure elections should want a functioning commission that shares that goal. Clearing the board only counts as a win if you put the right people in the chairs.
