President Donald Trump has fired all the remaining members of the Election Assistance Commission, a federal agency that helps run elections. Two Democratic officials were notified by email on Thursday that they were fired, according to Reuters. The last Republican on the commission quit before he could be fired too. The White House confirmed the firings on Friday.

The Election Assistance Commission is supposed to have four people in charge. By law, two must be Democrats and two must be Republicans. This balance was meant to keep any one party from controlling it. But now there is nobody left. This happened four months before November's midterm elections, according to Al Jazeera. The Associated Press confirmed the firings, AP News.

Congress created this agency in 2002 after a messy presidential election in 2000. The agency gives money to states for elections, suggests (but does not require) voting rules, checks that voting machines work properly, and runs the form people use to register to vote by mail. However, states still run their own elections. The federal government cannot force them to do anything. This was set up this way on purpose—to stop any one person at the top from controlling how America votes.

The White House said the president has the right to remove people from jobs he thinks are not aligned with "securing America's elections." The administration said it has been working with other agencies and local officials to "safeguard elections from fraud and abuse" before the midterms.

The fight started in March 2025. Trump signed an order saying the Election Assistance Commission had to require people to prove citizenship when they register to vote by mail. The commission refused. A judge blocked that order, saying the president did not have the power to tell an independent agency what to do. Trump appealed that decision, and it is still being decided.

In June 2026, the Supreme Court made a big decision. In a 6-3 vote, it sided with Trump. The Court said the president has more power than anyone thought to remove people from independent agencies. This ruling gave Trump legal support for what he did on Thursday. This also may affect the citizenship ruling, though the two cases are about slightly different questions.

Trump can hire new people to replace the ones he fired. But as of Friday, no one knew if he would do that or leave the agency empty. Even without commissioners, some of the agency's work would technically continue because it is the law—things like approving voting machines and running the mail-in registration form. But there would be nobody there to make decisions or handle new problems that come up before November.

What matters most is what this means for other independent agencies. For a long time, Congress has set up agencies like this one with rules that make it hard to fire the people in charge without a good reason. Congress did this on purpose, to keep presidents from controlling these agencies. The Supreme Court's ruling is starting to change that. When other agencies see what happened here, they will probably worry that they could be next.

There is also a question about elections themselves. Congress made sure the Election Commission had to be split evenly between parties because it wanted to stop one party from controlling how America votes. An agency with nobody in it does not technically break that rule. But it does raise a problem: What can Congress do if the president just leaves the seats empty instead of hiring new people? Congress could pass a new law to protect these agencies, but it would probably run into the same court problem that led to the June Supreme Court decision.