National

Two Weeks, Two Election Agencies, Zero Referees.

The Supreme Court granted at will removal power over independent agencies on June 29. The White House used it to empty the Election Assistance Commission on July 9, and cited the ruling by name. The other federal election referee, the FEC, has no quorum at all. Two agencies, two weeks, two methods.

Photo by Andy Luo / Unsplash

A referee can be overruled, starved, or removed. American election oversight experienced all three inside two weeks.

THE GAP

What the Coverage Gets Wrong

The firings trended under interference headlines and partisan statements, and the counterspin dismissed them as housekeeping at an agency nobody had heard of. Both frames miss the machinery. On Thursday night, the two Democratic commissioners of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission learned by email that their positions were "terminated, effective immediately." The lone remaining Republican commissioner got a phone call asking her to resign. By Friday morning, the only federal agency devoted solely to helping states run elections had zero commissioners, less than four months before the midterms.

The White House did not hide the mechanism. Asked for its legal basis, an official pointed to last month's Supreme Court decision: "The Slaughter decision gives the President precedence to do so."

That sentence is the story. Not the firings alone, but the machinery that made them routine, announced eleven days after the Court built it.

The Doctrine Arrived First

On June 29, in Trump v. Slaughter, the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 that the president can remove commissioners of independent agencies at will, overruling Humphrey's Executor, the 1935 precedent that let Congress insulate bipartisan commissions from the White House. Chief Justice Roberts wrote that whatever remained of the old rule, the Court was overruling it.

This did not happen in one stroke. The precedent was chipped in 2020, when the Court struck down removal protections for the CFPB's single director, and finished this term for multimember commissions. The Court carved out one exception, the Federal Reserve, by a separate 5 to 4 vote, an exception two of the Court's own conservatives called unprincipled. The pattern to hold onto: the lock was not smashed, it was picked one pin at a time, and the exception proves the rule is now discretionary.

Project 2025 called for exactly this, overruling Humphrey's Executor to bring so called independent agencies under direct presidential control. Written goal, judicial delivery, executive application, in that order. That is not a conspiracy claim. It is a compliance audit of a published document.

The Second Agency Died Differently

The EAC is one of two federal bodies that referee elections. The other, the Federal Election Commission, was neutralized the same fortnight by a different method: starvation.

On June 30, in NRSC v. FEC, the Court struck down the limits on coordinated spending between parties and candidates, 6 to 3, overruling its own 2001 precedent. But the limits were functionally dead before the ruling. The Justice Department had stopped enforcing them and refused to defend them in court, leaving the defense to outside counsel. And the FEC itself lacks a quorum, meaning the agency charged with enforcing campaign finance law cannot issue guidance or bring enforcement actions at all.

Two agencies, two methods, one result. One referee was removed by the new removal power. The other was abandoned first and overruled second. What always happens: enforcement dies before the law does, and the ruling arrives to ratify a corpse.

ROOT

The Wall Built in 1935

This machinery has been tested before, and the differences are the point. In 1935, Franklin Roosevelt fired an FTC commissioner who opposed the New Deal, and the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Humphrey's Executor that Congress could protect commissioners of independent agencies from exactly that. For ninety years, that case was the wall between the White House and the referees. Congress built the EAC behind that wall deliberately, creating it through the Help America Vote Act after the 2000 election specifically so that federal election assistance would sit outside any president's reach, four commissioners, no more than two from one party, Senate confirmation required. The wall came down in June. The firings came eleven days later.

The Vacancy That Was Survivable

The EAC itself has stood empty before. It sat without a single commissioner for three years starting in December 2011, hamstrung but functioning, because career staff carried on certifying voting equipment and nobody was threatening them. Election experts say this week's firings will likely have little practical effect on the November midterms themselves, because elections are administered by states and counties, not Washington. Both facts are true. Neither rescues the situation, because the environment around the vacancy has changed.

This month, the Justice Department sent letters to election officials in all fifty states warning they could face criminal penalties over noncitizens on voter rolls. FEMA has reportedly threatened to withhold terrorism grant funding from states that do not comply with election directives. The Center for Democracy and Technology put the new logic plainly: a workforce that watched its commissioners fired by email has every incentive to read every ambiguous instruction from the White House as one it cannot afford to resist.

The vacancy is precedented. The vacancy plus prosecution letters plus grant leverage plus a demonstrated willingness to fire by email is not. The mechanism is not removal alone. It is removal plus fear, applied to the people who count.

THE COUNTER MECHANISM

One structural action, same layer as the problem.

The federal referee layer is being dismantled, but American elections are actually run by counties, and counties are recruiting right now for November. Benjamin Hovland, one of the fired commissioners, said it himself on his way out: much of what his agency existed to do was help election officials, and ordinary people can serve that same function by working the polls.

So become the referee. Sign up as a poll worker with your county registrar, in Los Angeles County that is lavote.gov, most counties pay for training and election day. While you are there, two five minute defenses: confirm your own registration status now, not in October, and learn your state's ballot cure process so a challenged ballot does not become a discarded one.

The referees who were removed cannot be reinstated by readers. The layer that still functions can be staffed by them.

A referee can be overruled, starved, or removed. A reader can be one.