Trump Fires Every Member of the Federal Election Agency Months Before the Midterms

President Donald Trump fired all three remaining members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission on Thursday, abruptly hollowing out the only federal agency dedicated solely to election administration just months before the 2026 midterm elections.

The two Democratic commissioners, Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland, were notified of their removal by email, according to people familiar with the decision. The lone Republican, Christy McCormick, was allowed to resign. With no commissioners left in place, the bipartisan agency is effectively frozen: it cannot approve new certifications, update guidance for voting-system testing laboratories, or resolve disputes over standards, because those actions require a quorum of commissioners to vote.

The move lands at a delicate moment. Trump has spent months pushing to reshape federal voting rules, including efforts to alter the national mail voter registration form and to tighten voting-system standards. The Election Assistance Commission is one of the few bodies with formal authority over those very questions, which means dismantling its leadership cuts in two directions at once — it stalls routine commission business while also removing an independent check that could have complicated, or accelerated, the administration's own plans depending on who filled the seats.

Created by Congress in the aftermath of the disputed 2000 Florida recount, the commission was designed as a deliberately low-profile, bipartisan clearinghouse. It distributes federal funds to states for election equipment, tests and certifies voting machines, maintains the federal registration form, and publishes best-practice guidance that thousands of county and municipal election offices lean on to run their contests. By law it is meant to be evenly divided between the parties, a structure intended to keep it out of partisan fights. Voting-rights advocates warned that leaving it leaderless heading into a national election strips away technical support that state and local officials rely on and injects fresh uncertainty into the certification of the machines Americans will use in November.

Legal experts said the firings are likely to draw immediate court challenges over whether the president has the authority to remove the commissioners at will, given the agency's bipartisan design and statutory independence. Democrats and election administrators cast the decision as part of a broader pattern of pressure on the machinery of elections, while the White House framed it as an exercise of executive authority over the federal workforce. However the litigation unfolds, officials across the country are now confronting the prospect of running a midterm cycle with the federal government's dedicated election agency unable to function. For state and local administrators already stretched thin, the loss of a central point of coordination arrives at the worst possible moment in the electoral calendar.