President Donald Trump has removed the two remaining Democratic commissioners of the Election Assistance Commission, leaving the independent federal agency without a single sitting member for the first time since its creation. The two Democrats, Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland, were notified of their dismissal by email on Thursday, according to Reuters. The commission's lone remaining Republican, Christy McCormick, resigned rather than await a similar fate. The White House confirmed the removals on Friday.

The EAC is designed to run on four commissioners, split evenly between the two parties by statute. That balance had already been broken in April, when Republican appointee Donald Palmer departed, according to Al Jazeera. Thursday's dismissals and McCormick's resignation eliminate the roster entirely, four months before the November midterms. The Associated Press independently confirmed the ousters, describing them as an action against a bipartisan federal body charged with assisting state and local election administration, AP News.

Congress created the EAC in 2002 in the aftermath of the disputed 2000 presidential election, tasking it with distributing federal election funding, issuing non-binding voting guidelines, certifying voting systems, and maintaining the national mail voter registration form. None of these functions carry direct enforcement power over states, which retain primary control of election administration under the Constitution — a design feature that has historically insulated the commission from claims it could tip outcomes, but has also left it with limited institutional muscle to defend itself against removal.

The White House framed the dismissals as a matter of executive prerogative rather than a comment on the commissioners' individual conduct. "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," the administration said in its statement confirming the action, per Al Jazeera's reporting. Officials added that the administration has been "working across all agencies and local partners to safeguard elections from fraud and abuse" ahead of the midterms.

The immediate trigger appears rooted in a dispute dating to March 2025, when Trump signed an executive order directing the EAC to require documentary proof of citizenship on the national mail voter registration form. The commission declined to implement that directive. A federal judge subsequently blocked the citizenship-proof provision, ruling that the president had exceeded his authority over an independent agency Congress structured to operate at arm's length from the White House. Trump has appealed that ruling, and the case remains unresolved.

What has changed since that standoff is the legal terrain underneath it. In June 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Trump's favor in a separate case, expanding presidential authority to remove members of independent agencies without cause. That ruling supplies the legal cover for Thursday's dismissals in a way that would have been far more contestable a year earlier. Whether it also weakens Trump's pending appeal on the citizenship-documentation order is a separate question — that case turns on statutory rulemaking authority, not removal power — but the Court's expansive reading of unitary executive theory now looms over both disputes.

The law permits Trump to nominate replacements to the EAC, but as of Friday it was not clear whether the administration intends to fill the vacancies or leave the commission dormant heading into the midterms. A vacant EAC would still leave the certification and mail-registration functions technically in place, since they are statutory duties rather than discretionary programs, but with no commissioners to vote on guidance, certify new systems, or respond to controversies as they arise in the run-up to November.

The precedent set here extends well beyond one commission's staffing. Independent agencies from the FTC to the NLRB have relied for decades on for-cause removal protections that Congress wrote into their enabling statutes specifically to buffer them from partisan turnover. The Supreme Court's June ruling chips at that architecture broadly, and the EAC's evisceration is likely to be read by other agency heads — and their lawyers — as an early test case of how far the doctrine now reaches in practice, not merely in theory.

There is also a narrower question specific to elections. The EAC was built with bipartisan balance as a statutory requirement precisely because its predecessor arrangements, pre-2002, were seen as too easily captured by whichever party held the White House. An EAC with zero sitting commissioners of either party does not violate that balance requirement in a technical sense — there is no imbalance where there is no membership — but it does raise the question of what recourse exists if the administration opts to leave the seats empty through the midterms rather than nominate a bipartisan slate. Congress retains oversight authority and could legislate new removal protections, though any such effort would likely face the same constitutional challenge that produced the June ruling in the first place.