President Donald Trump fired the three remaining members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission on Thursday, leaving the federal election agency with no commissioners and unable to take official action. Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland were told by email that their positions were terminated effective immediately, while Christy McCormick was allowed to resign.
The email to Hicks and Hovland came from Morgan DeWitt Snow, the deputy director of presidential personnel in the Executive Office of the President, and it said, in part, that their positions were terminated effective immediately and thanked them for their service. That stripped the four-member commission down to nothing. Until new members are installed, the commission cannot act, even though it is the only federal agency devoted solely to election administration.
The timing matters because it came days after the Supreme Court issued two major removal-power decisions in late June that widened the president’s authority to fire leaders of independent agencies. In Trump v. Slaughter, the court said the president may remove leaders of agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission, while carving out a separate rule for Federal Reserve governors in another case. The question that now hangs over the election commission is whether that same rule applies to bipartisan bodies built with a fixed political balance.
That gap is not academic. The U.S. Election Assistance Commission was created by Congress after the 2000 election to distribute federal election funds, maintain the national mail voter registration form, test and certify voting systems, and give guidance to state and local election officials. Its commissioners must be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, with no more than two from the same party, which is why the dismissals leave the agency frozen until the White House names replacements and the Senate acts on them.
Rick Hasen called it an open question whether the EAC falls within the Supreme Court’s new removal-power rule, and he said the issue has not been tested for political entities built around bipartisan balance. That uncertainty matters now because Trump has already used his expanded removal power elsewhere, including firing Ellen Weintraub, a Democratic commissioner on the FEC, earlier this year. The EAC is not a large agency, but when it loses every commissioner at once, even its limited work stops cold.
What comes next is simple in theory and difficult in practice: new commissioners have to be nominated and confirmed before the EAC can do anything again. Until that happens, the agency created to help run the country’s elections sits on pause, with no one left inside it to vote, approve, or certify a thing.
