President Trump on Thursday purged the entire bipartisan leadership of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission — the small, unglamorous body that exists, by statute, to keep the federal hand off the voting machine. The Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Slaughter supplied the legal veneer; the operation is the raw seizure of a referee. The complacency is ahead of the threat.
Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer, reacting to the firings, accused Mr. Trump of “a brazen attempt to seize control of our elections before a single vote is cast.” He is right.
Created in 2002 in the wake of the Florida recount, the EAC hands out grants for election security — $15 million last year in crucial lifelines to underfunded local boards. It publishes a biennial report full of voting statistics that track the health of our democracy. It oversees the certification of election equipment against a set of Voluntary Voting System Guidelines, ensuring the machines that count our votes actually work. None of this is glamorous, and that is the point. A President willing to seize something this small is a President who will not hesitate to seize something larger.
While the EAC’s functions are vital, the November elections will not be free and fair if the agency were hit by an asteroid and vaporized — and this President is acting as the asteroid. The agency has four bipartisan seats. Mr. Trump fired two Democrats, Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland. A Republican, Christy McCormick, was “allowed to resign,” news stories say, proving this is a purge of anyone who might resist. A fourth seat was vacant. The bipartisan firewall, designed so no President could stack the commission with loyalists, has been breached.
Basic functions can continue under the EAC’s staff, for now — a decapitated agency cannot enforce the standards a rogue executive is desperate to bypass, but the staff can carry the paperwork while the new loyalists are being confirmed. When Mr. Hovland arrived in 2019, the EAC announced it was “the first time in a decade that the commission has had a full quorum.” That announcement now reads like a eulogy for a functional government. Quorum matters because it is the mechanism by which a sitting President is denied unilateral control of the body’s major actions — three commissioners, including at least one Democrat, are required. Until his replacement is seated, the President has cleared the board to rule by fiat in the interim.
There is a glaring hypocrisy nesting in the establishment’s response to Mr. Trump’s firings. For years, the right has attacked any federal role in elections as a “power grab” — and now applauds the largest executive power grab over elections in modern memory. Democrats pushed H.R.1 under President Biden, which would have let the EAC dole out money for recruiting poll workers and running state redistricting commissions. That was modest. Mr. Trump’s move to assert personal control of the EAC is not a chance for Democrats to repent, but a glaring warning about what happens when Republicans get their hands on the levers of federal election administration.
The last national alarm involving the EAC was in early 2025, when Mr. Trump issued an executive order telling it to add a citizenship check to the “national mail voter registration form.” The courts blocked it — but only temporarily. The Slaughter decision has handed him the keys to bypass those courts entirely. Now that Mr. Trump has fired all the commissioners, he is simply clearing the board to make his second attempt without the nuisance of bipartisan oversight. The President has now removed the bipartisan internal check that stood between the executive and the EAC’s compliance — leaving the courts alone to enforce the first ruling against a commission that no longer has any reason to listen. He only has to wait until the Senate confirms replacement commissioners loyal to him.
Mr. Trump’s cleanout of the EAC is probably the first of many such firings after Slaughter, a sweeping purge of the administrative state’s remaining independence, because Slaughter gave him the knife and he has only just begun to use it. That makes this a ripe moment for lawmakers to reconsider the catastrophic mistake of empowering the Supreme Court to dismantle the independent agencies they spent decades building to constrain executive overreach.
“Would Congress have delegated so much power,” as Justice Neil Gorsuch asked in his Slaughter concurrence, “had it known that the President would come to control them?” The answer, evident now, is that Congress never imagined a President brazen enough to weaponize that control against the Republic itself. Congress should answer by taking the power back — not by handing it to a President who has used it to try to overturn an election.
If Democrats decide they want to protect the federal bureaucracy from being turned into a personal weapon, they will find no allies among those who just cheered its decapitation. The details might vary agency by agency, but suggesting the EAC’s work could be done by, say, the National Association of Secretaries of State is a dangerous abdication — handing the keys to a club of partisan state officials, until a Republican President tells the nation’s election officials who they must answer to. Yet many Republicans are too busy pretending they wouldn’t dismantle the exact same administrative state if a Democrat won in 2028, while ignoring the wreckage they are causing today.
Meantime, states and counties are busy with the actual work of making the midterm elections happen — but they have just lost the federal support that was underwriting the machinery, under a President who has made clear he is willing to do whatever he can to help Republicans keep Congress in November. That now includes taking control of the agency that certifies voting machines and disburses election-security grants. The terrifying reality is that the ballots are controlled by thousands of different state and local officials, many of whom have just watched their federal watchdogs disappear.
At every twitch, the establishment press will urge calm. The right is actively casting doubt on elections and subverting them when it suits them, while the left is fighting to ensure every ballot is counted. Only one side has the sitting President purging the bipartisan referees. A President willing to fire the bipartisan referees is a President willing to fire anyone.
