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In 2002, Congress created the Election Assistance Commission to administer the Help America Vote Act, which assists states in reforming their elections. On Thursday, the EAC dropped below a quorum after President Donald Trump fired its three remaining members. By statute, the commission requires the affirmative vote of at least three members to act. In the middle of an election year, Trump has hamstrung the only federal agency dedicated to helping states run their elections.
The EAC is one of dozens of multimember commissions that make up an overlooked part of the federal government. Some, such as the Federal Reserve or the Federal Trade Commission, are household names. Others, like the Marine Mammal Commission, are quite obscure. In establishing these commissions, Congress wanted the commissioners to use their expertise and collective decision-making to shape important areas of policy without partisan influence. Although the president appoints these commissioners with the advice and consent of the Senate, Congress often—but not always—protected them from removal except for cause.
In Trump v. Slaughter, the Supreme Court struck down these removal protections as a violation of the president’s power under Article 2, overruling a 91-year-old precedent that reached the opposite conclusion. With the exception of the Fed, Slaughter allows the president to remove appointees from these commissions at will.
Much of the discussion of Slaughter has focused on the president’s ability to shape the behavior of commissioners by threatening to remove them from their positions. Before Slaughter, presidents who wanted to reshape a multimember commission generally needed to wait for the commissioners’ terms to expire to nominate replacements who shared their policy preferences. Slaughter allows presidents to immediately remove and nominate commissioners.
But Slaughter also provided Trump with a new, more dangerous weapon: the ability to incapacitate these commissions by depriving them of a quorum. A quorum is the minimum number of members who must be present for the commission to engage in rulemaking, issue final decisions in adjudications, initiate enforcement actions, and otherwise conduct business. Many commissions cannot conduct business without a quorum of a simple majority of commissioners.
Consequently, a president who dislikes the work performed by a commission can now dismantle it without securing new legislation to defund or abolish it. Because commissions are small—often three to five members—a well-timed pair of firings can leave a group without the number of members it needs to act. With the president’s removal of enough members to drop the commission below its quorum, then refusal to fill the vacancies, the agency continues to exist on paper but cannot decide cases, promulgate rules, or approve enforcement actions.
Part of the problem stems from the way the law handles vacant positions in these multimember commissions. The Federal Vacancies Reform Act, which normally lets the president name an acting official when a Senate-confirmed appointee leaves, does not cover most commissioners. The seat stays empty until the Senate confirms someone new. If the president chooses not to nominate a replacement, the seat stays empty indefinitely.
The Trump administration has already demonstrated the danger of quorum losses. In the first 10 months of the president’s term, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Election Commission, the Merit Systems Protection Board, the National Labor Relations Board, and the Tennessee Valley Authority all lost their quorums. In an empirical study, my co-author Todd Phillips and I found that at least 15 commissions were inquorate at some point during that period. Most of the losses were caused, directly or indirectly, by presidential removal.
The clearest costs are borne by Americans who use adjudicatory commissions to enforce rights they cannot apply anywhere else. For example, federal employees have a constitutional and statutory right to a hearing before they can be fired from their positions. For federal employees, that hearing takes place at the Merit Systems Protection Board. Supreme Court precedent bars going directly to federal court—even when the MSPB lacks a quorum. Employees must first exhaust their administrative remedies at an agency that cannot decide their case. From 2017 to 2022, the MSPB lost its quorum, and its backlog reached roughly 3,800 cases. Employees waited over five years for the board to decide whether they had been unlawfully removed from their positions. In 2025, the MSPB again lost its quorum after Trump removed one of its two remaining members, leaving thousands of employees without a forum to vindicate their constitutional rights. (That removal, though unlawful at the time, was later upheld by Slaughter.)
The Federal Election Commission presents a similar case. The commission enforces federal campaign-finance laws against candidates, parties, and outside spenders, but doing so requires four affirmative votes from six commissioners. Since May 2025, the FEC has had three or fewer members. As of this writing, it has only two members. Although the commission continues to receive complaints about violations of campaign-finance laws, it is unable to conduct investigations, finalize pending cases, or issue civil penalties against rule breakers. With the 2026 midterms approaching, some complaints will expire under the five-year statute of limitations before Congress manages to restore the FEC’s quorum. Presidents who want to sap campaign-finance enforcement during their own election year need not persuade Congress to repeal the law. They need only ensure that the commission cannot muster four votes.
Even after Slaughter, Congress could largely fix this problem by statute. Three reforms would go a long way. First, Congress should authorize plaintiffs to file claims in federal court whenever an adjudicatory commission lacks a quorum to decide them, giving individuals an alternative forum when the president enfeebles the agencies charged with protecting their constitutional and statutory rights. Second, Congress should explicitly empower federal courts to set aside any action a commission takes while inquorate. That authority is, oddly enough, not currently enshrined in statute.
Third, Congress should establish a default quorum rule requiring a simple majority of statutorily authorized seats—not sitting members—to transact business, foreclosing the strategy of running a five-member commission through a single loyalist. Together, these reforms raise the cost of quorum-busting. A president who hobbles a commission by removing members risks having its remaining actions unwound in court and its docket rerouted to Article 3 judges, leaving the commander in chief with less control over the commission’s work, not more.
As Max Sarinsky recently noted in Slate, reform of multimember commissions may be possible if Democrats take the Senate in this year’s midterms, creating conditions for a compromise. None of these reforms would displace Slaughter’s core holding. Presidents would remain free to fire commissioners. What the reforms would discourage is the strategic use of firings to immobilize the commissions themselves.
In the meantime, lower courts should test the limits of Slaughter by enjoining removals that hamstring agencies by denying them a quorum. The Supreme Court told us in Slaughter that the president’s constitutional duty is to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. But a president cannot execute the laws by undermining the agencies that Congress designed to execute them. Whether Congress and the courts will act to protect those agencies is a separate question. It is, however, the one that will determine whether Slaughter is a decision about accountability or a decision about power.
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Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Kenny Holston/Pool/Getty Images and Getty Images Plus.
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