On July 9, 2026, President Donald Trump fired every remaining member of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission — the one federal agency whose entire job is to help run fair elections. With no commissioners left, the agency legally cannot take any action at all.

The timing is not an accident. It comes right in the middle of the 2026 election cycle, and just as the Trump administration is trying to rewrite federal voting rules from the top down.

What just happened

The Election Assistance Commission, or EAC, has four seats, split between the two parties so neither side can control it. Here's how Trump emptied it:

• The two Democratic commissioners, Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland, were fired by email. "On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as Commissioner of the Election Assistance Commission is terminated, effective immediately," the message read. It was signed by a deputy director of presidential personnel.
• The Republican commissioner, Christy McCormick, was allowed to resign instead.
• The fourth seat was already empty — Republican Donald Palmer had left earlier this year to join the Heritage Foundation.

That leaves zero commissioners. And under the law, the EAC "cannot take official action until new members are installed."

Why this agency matters

Congress created the EAC after the disputed 2000 election so states could improve how they run elections — without the federal government taking over. It doesn't run your local election. What it does do is quietly important:

• It tests and certifies voting machines against federal standards. Many states won't buy or use equipment unless the EAC has certified it.
• It maintains the national mail voter registration form.
• It hands out federal election funding to states.
• It offers guidance and best practices to local election officials.

Freeze the EAC, and all of that stalls. As Votebeat reported, the shutdown "could stall not only routine commission business, but also any attempt by the Trump administration to use the agency to alter the federal voter registration form or voting-system standards before the 2026 midterms."

In other words: Trump has grabbed the steering wheel of the referee — and then benched every referee.

Part of a bigger power grab

This isn't happening in a vacuum. Just days earlier, the Supreme Court handed Trump new power to fire the leaders of independent agencies, overturning decades of precedent that had kept bipartisan commissions free from direct White House control. Earlier this year, Trump also fired Ellen Weintraub, a Democratic member of the Federal Election Commission.

Now he's cleared out the EAC too. Whether a president can legally fire the members of a bipartisan election agency at will is still an open legal question. "It's an open question about the EAC and the [Federal Election Commission]," Rick Hasen, an election law professor at UCLA, told Votebeat. If one of the fired commissioners sues, this could be the first real test of it.

Meanwhile, Trump can't just install his own replacements. New commissioners have to be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, and no more than two can come from the same party. So for now, the agency simply sits frozen.

The pattern

Put this next to the administration's plan to withhold homeland security money from states unless they change their voting systems, and a clear picture emerges. When Trump wants to reshape how America votes, he isn't going through Congress or the states — he's seizing control of the machinery and shutting down anyone in the way.

An election agency with no one left to run it can't protect anything. That's the point. And with the midterms already underway, the people who lose out are voters — all of us — who are left with less oversight of our elections, not more.

Source

Reporting by Jessica Huseman / Votebeat, via Arizona Mirror.