President Donald Trump has removed the two remaining Democratic commissioners from the Election Assistance Commission, an independent federal agency tasked with supporting U.S. elections. Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland were notified of their dismissal by email on Thursday, according to Reuters. The commission's last Republican member, Christy McCormick, resigned before facing the same fate. The White House confirmed the removals on Friday.

The EAC is structured by law to have four commissioners, split equally between Democrats and Republicans. That balance was already damaged in April when Republican appointee Donald Palmer left, according to Al Jazeera. Thursday's removals and McCormick's resignation leave the agency completely unstaffed four months before the November midterms. The Associated Press independently confirmed the ousters, describing them as an action against a bipartisan federal agency charged with assisting state and local election administration, AP News.

Congress created the EAC in 2002 following the disputed 2000 presidential election. The agency distributes federal election funding, issues non-binding voting guidelines, certifies voting systems, and maintains the national mail voter registration form. Importantly, the EAC has no direct power to enforce rules on states, which retain constitutional control over their own election administration. This structure was designed to prevent the commission from becoming a tool for partisan advantage, but it also left the agency with limited ability to defend itself when commissioners are removed.

The White House framed the dismissals as a straightforward exercise of presidential power. "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, per Al Jazeera's reporting. Officials also stated 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 source of conflict dates 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 refused to implement the order. A federal judge subsequently blocked the citizenship requirement, ruling that the president had overstepped his authority over an independent agency Congress deliberately structured to operate independently from the White House. Trump appealed that ruling, and the case remains unresolved.

What shifted the legal landscape was a Supreme Court decision in June 2026. In a 6-3 ruling, the Court sided with Trump in a separate case, significantly expanding presidential power to remove members of independent agencies without cause. That decision provides legal justification for Thursday's removals in a way that would have been much harder to defend a year ago. The Court's broad interpretation of presidential power now hangs over both the citizenship-documentation dispute and the broader question of how much authority the president actually holds over independent agencies, though the citizenship case itself turns on different legal grounds.

Trump has the authority to nominate replacements to the EAC, but as of Friday it remained unclear whether the administration planned to fill the vacant seats or leave the commission dormant through the midterms. A vacant EAC would technically preserve certain statutory duties like mail-voter registration and system certification, but without commissioners in place, there would be no one to vote on new guidance, certify voting systems, or address controversies that arise before November.

The wider implications go far beyond one agency's staffing. For decades, independent agencies ranging from the FTC to the NLRB have relied on rules that protect their leaders from being fired without cause — protections Congress deliberately built into their founding laws to shield them from partisan pressure. The Supreme Court's June ruling begins to erode that framework, and the EAC's dismantling will likely signal to other independent agencies and their leaders what the new limits on their autonomy actually are in practice.

There is also a narrower concern specific to elections. Congress created the EAC with mandatory bipartisan balance precisely because earlier arrangements were seen as too easily controlled by whichever party held the White House. An agency with zero commissioners does not technically violate the balance requirement — there is no imbalance if there is no membership at all. But it does raise a harder question: what leverage does Congress have if the administration chooses to leave seats empty through November rather than nominate a balanced slate of new commissioners? Congress retains oversight authority and could pass new laws to protect agency leaders from removal, though any such effort would face the same constitutional obstacles that produced the June Supreme Court ruling in the first place.