The Federal Election Commission has canceled all of its scheduled public meetings until 2026 — a tacit acknowledgement that the agency’s months-long de facto shutdown at the hands of President Donald Trump won’t end anytime soon.
The imminent departure of the last remaining Republican commissioner, Trey Trainor, who announced his resignation Thursday, prompted the FEC to axe the FEC’s remaining meetings in 2025 while it still had the numbers to do so.
The six-member, bipartisan commission needs a quorum of at least four commissioners to execute its high-level duties, such as enforcing campaign finance laws and issuing legal rulings. With Trainor’s departure, two commissioners will remain.
FEC Chair Shana Broussard, a Democrat, called the lack of a quorum “an extreme hardship” for the agency.
“Other people report that we’re hobbled and I hate to agree with it, but we are hobbled,” Broussard told NOTUS.
A White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity told NOTUS that they were “still in the process of selecting candidates.”
The White House did not immediately comment on the status of three FEC commissioner candidates, Republicans Andrew Woodson of Wiley Rein and Ashley Stow, who works with Trainor at the FEC, as well as Democrat Jonathan Peterson of Elias Law Group. NOTUS previously reported that congressional leaders had recommended the three candidates to Trump.
Without a Republican counterpart, the two remaining commissioners are effectively hamstrung. FEC Directive 10 requires a majority vote of at least three members to adjourn or recess, prompting the bulk cancellation as Trainor prepares to depart.
“Now we can’t take even administrative votes like canceling or scheduling meetings. To get ahead of that, we are trying to do this scheduling while we still have Commissioner [Trey] Trainor,” Dara Lindenbaum, also a Democrat, told NOTUS.
“We were limited in actions we could take when we didn’t have a quorum before. With only two commissioners of the same party, we’re even more limited,” Lindenbaum added.
The FEC has been without a quorum since April, when it last held a public meeting. Trump has not nominated replacements for Republican commissioners Sean Cooksey and Allen Dickerson, who both resigned since January, or the one Democratic commissioner, Ellen Weintraub, whom he dismissed in February over her objections.
Trump has not acted on three FEC commissioner candidates submitted to him earlier this year by congressional leaders, as NOTUS previously reported. Trainor told NOTUS Thursday that he hopes his resignation will help push the process forward.
In recent years, the FEC’s workload has grown as its staffing, funding and power to do its congressionally mandated job have waned.
Federal candidates, committees and organizations disclosed spending nearly $9.5 billion during the 2022 midterms, according to OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan nonprofit that tracks the flow of money in politics. The topline total has historically trended upward each election cycle, meaning the amount of money flowing into the upcoming elections is expected to soar past that sum.
While the FEC can still carry out basic functions, including publishing political committees’ campaign finance reports, it’s presently unable to interpret campaign finance laws for those spending that money and enforce alleged violations. Its investigation backlog is likely to grow into the hundreds of cases since Broussard and Lindenbaum alone cannot rule on them.
The FEC faced extended work stoppages in 2019 and 2020 because it didn’t have enough commissioners to operate. Even if Trump nominated FEC commissioner candidates today, weeks or even months would likely elapse before they received a confirmation vote in the U.S. Senate, which must confirm any FEC nominee.
“With just over a year until the midterm elections, we need a cop on the beat at the FEC now more than ever,” Aaron Scherb, a longtime government ethics watchdog who publishes the Democracy Download newsletter, told NOTUS. “For far too long, corporate special interests have used hundreds of millions of dollars in secret money to drown out the voices of everyday Americans. It’s critically important that the FEC can have a quorum because voters deserve to know who is trying to influence their voices and their votes.”
Broussard and Lindenbaum both said the FEC was ready to hit the ground running whenever a quorum is restored.
“Because of the great work that our staff is doing, we are ready for commissioners to come in, and we hope it happens soon,” Lindenbaum said.