Zero and Two

The Firing

On July 9, 2026, the White House fired the two Democratic commissioners of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission — Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland — by email. The lone remaining Republican, Christy McCormick, was asked to resign, and did. A fourth seat had already sat empty since April. The termination notices were signed by Morgan DeWitt Snow, deputy director of presidential personnel — a staffer, not a principal, executing a decision made well above her pay grade. The White House's own justification cited a Supreme Court decision by name: Trump v. Slaughter.

The Ruling

Ten days earlier, on June 29, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Trump v. Slaughter that presidents can remove commissioners of independent agencies at will, overturning Humphrey's Executor — the 91-year-old precedent, itself a loss for Franklin Roosevelt, that had shielded agencies like the FTC from direct presidential control. Chief Justice Roberts wrote for a majority joined by Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. As documented in Fire at Will →, the same ruling explicitly carved the Federal Reserve out of its own logic, preserving the Fed's independence because of its unusual congressionally chartered, quasi-private structure. STOCK Act →

The Election Assistance Commission has no such carve-out. Neither does the Federal Election Commission. Both were designed the way the FTC was — as bipartisan boards, with statutory caps on how many commissioners can belong to one party. Under Trump v. Slaughter, that design is now an open question, not a protection.

Election law scholar Rick Hasen has said publicly that it remains unresolved whether Slaughter's logic even reaches bipartisan-structured election bodies like the EAC or FEC — Congress built them differently than the FTC on purpose, to keep election administration out of any single party's hands. Nobody has tested that question in court. Not yet.

What's Frozen

Without commissioners, the EAC cannot certify voting systems, accredit testing labs, update the national mail voter registration form, or distribute federal election security grants — in the middle of an active midterm cycle. Reuters and the Associated Press independently confirmed the firings and the resulting paralysis. Sen. Chuck Schumer and Sen. Mark Warner both issued statements calling the move dangerous. David Axelrod called it a "flashing red signal."

The Quieter Twin

The Federal Election Commission's version of this story started fourteen months earlier and has drawn far less attention. On January 31, 2025, the White House sent Commissioner Ellen Weintraub a letter removing her, effective immediately. She disputed it publicly — there's a legal way to replace FEC commissioners, she said, and this wasn't it — but she never filed a direct legal challenge. She filed an amicus brief in someone else's case instead. By late March 2025, the FEC was ruling as a four-person body without her.

Nine days into the new administration, Commissioner Sean Cooksey, a Republican, resigned to become counsel to Vice President Vance. A fourth commissioner departed in October 2025. Since May 1, 2025, the FEC has lacked the four-commissioner quorum it needs to make policy. It has had exactly two sitting commissioners since October. Two nominees, Ashley Stow and Andrew Woodson, have been pending Senate confirmation since February 2026.

No lawsuit has ever been filed over Weintraub's removal. The question Hasen raises about the EAC — whether Slaughter reaches a body Congress deliberately built to be bipartisan — has now gone unlitigated at the FEC for a year and a half.

The Revolving Door

One member of the EAC left before the purge, not during it. Donald Palmer's term ended April 30, 2026. One week later, on May 7, the Heritage Foundation announced him as its Senior Legal Fellow for Election Integrity. Heritage's Institute for Constitutional Government had already been publishing SAVE Act advocacy throughout that window. Palmer himself published a Heritage piece on USPS mail-ballot security standards on June 29 — the same day the Supreme Court decided Trump v. Slaughter.

Palmer did not leave the EAC to escape a purge that hadn't happened yet. He left months early, and walked directly into an organization already building the policy architecture — the SAVE Act — that a gutted EAC would no longer be positioned to push back on.

On the Record

Michael Waldman and the Brennan Center, Sen. Alex Padilla and Rep. Joe Morelle in a joint statement, and Trevor Potter — a Republican, former FEC chairman, and now president of the Campaign Legal Center — have all called the EAC removals unlawful. Potter's position matters here specifically because he is not a Democrat making a partisan complaint; he ran the FEC as a Republican appointee. Investigations →

What Has Not Been Shown

This is not a claim that Palmer's departure and the July firings were coordinated. The sequencing — his term ending in April, the purge in July — is suggestive on its own terms, but ten weeks is enough time for it to be coincidence, and nothing here shows Heritage or the White House communicating about timing.

No lawsuit has been filed by Hicks or Hovland as of this writing, which means the central legal question — whether a president can remove commissioners of a body Congress built to require bipartisan balance — remains untested, not settled. Framing this as a legal "victory" for the administration gets ahead of what the law currently says.

Trevor Potter's statement that the removals are unlawful is his legal opinion as an advocate, not a ruling from any court.

There is no evidence in the public record connecting the stalled Stow and Woodson FEC nominations to the EAC firings. They may simply be an ordinary confirmation backlog, unrelated to anything else in this dispatch.