On May 1, 2025, the Federal Election Commission entered what agency brass expected to be a relatively short work stoppage after dropping below the minimum number of commissioners required — four — to conduct high-level business.

One year later, the FEC remains idled: It still can’t investigate suspected scofflaws, formalize audits, issue fines, write rules, offer formal legal guidance or even conduct public meetings as the 2026 midterms approach.

For more than nine months after the de facto shutdown began, President Donald Trump declined to name commissioner nominees that would allow the bipartisan agency to regain its quorum. He finally tapped a pair of Republican nominees to serve alongside two remaining Democrats in February, but the Republican-controlled Senate has yet to schedule a confirmation hearing for either of them.

In interviews this month with a politically diverse slate of 22 former FEC commissioners, former staff members and attorneys with regular business before the commission, many concluded to NOTUS that the FEC — already diminished in statutory authority by years of adverse court rulings and starved by Congress of requested resources — is destined to functionally contract into what’s primarily a government records clearinghouse.

The lesson here, many former FEC commissioners and practitioners say, is that Trump and Congress have little collective interest in empowering the FEC beyond its core transparency function. The full mission of the FEC — serving as an independent regulatory agency “charged with administering and enforcing the federal campaign finance law” — is therefore imperiled. And barring a major power shift in Washington, such as regulation-minded Democrats occupying the White House and both chambers of Congress, the situation isn’t likely to change in the foreseeable future.

Some cheer this reality, arguing liberal commissioners on the FEC have long attempted to exceed the bounds of election law to limit campaign spending, and therefore political speech.

“I reject the biased premise that increased regulation of political speech is a good thing — it’s not,” former Republican FEC Chair Sean Cooksey told NOTUS. Others vow to help eventually change this reality, citing a slate of electioneering issues — foreign money, “dark money,” unlimited campaign spending, rapidly changing uses of digital fundraising tools and artificial intelligence.

“We absolutely need a strong federal watchdog holding politicians and their backers accountable when they violate campaign finance laws,” said Trevor Potter, another former Republican FEC chair who is now president of the nonprofit watchdog Campaign Legal Center.

Regulatory or deregulatory aspirations aside, the FEC remains profoundly stuck.

The Senate Rules Committee, which is responsible for scheduling the hearings of Trump’s commissioner nominees, declined to comment when NOTUS asked if there is a timeline for the hearings or if they would happen before the midterm elections.

A source familiar with the committee’s work told NOTUS, “There continue to be paperwork issues that need to be completed before their hearing.”

Meanwhile, the agency’s backlog of pending enforcement matters — at least 195 as of early March, according to FEC Chair Shana Broussard — has probably increased with the hobbled commission unable to act on them.

“This Commission needs a quorum. Optimally, the Commission should have six commissioners, but we’ll take four,” Broussard said in a statement to NOTUS.

The agency also is operating with a barebones staff and facing budget cuts that could make it more challenging to hire and retain talent to slog through the backlog and act on new complaints in a timely manner.

At best, it could be months — or possibly years — before the FEC begins investigating disputes relevant to the 2026 midterms.

It’s quite plausible, for example, that the FEC won’t rule until 2029 or beyond on any number of contemporary political disputes: a February complaint by the reelection campaign of Sen. Bill Cassidy against Republican primary challenger Julia Letlow, an August 2025 complaint against House Speaker Mike Johnson, a May 2025 complaint against Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign committee, and a “straw donor” complaint filed against Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick the day before she resigned last week.

And there’s real risk the FEC may never rule on some cases at all, given that cases have a five-year statute of limitation.

In the meantime, the agency is powerless to punish anyone: In fiscal year 2026, the FEC’s fine assessment stands at zero dollars — a result of the commission’s inability to issue fines without a quorum. Even before that, issued fines had been declining every year since fiscal year 2022, when it assessed about $3.6 million in civil penalties, according to an agency financial report.

It’s not as if the FEC itself isn’t trying.

In a little-noticed strategic plan draft for fiscal years 2026 through 2030, the FEC commits to “robustly enforcing” laws “through audits, investigations and civil litigation.”

But the agency tempers itself in a brief but revealing section acknowledging its goals have been “influenced by a variety of external factors” and “unanticipated events.”

Chief among them: the lack of a commissioner quorum and agency funding.

Several current and former FEC staffers lamented that even with a commissioner quorum, the agency is so woefully underfunded and understaffed that it has little hope of keeping pace with a massive increase in federal campaign spending and the volume of data it’s tasked with processing.

Consider that from fiscal years 2012 to 2024, there was a more than 11-fold increase in the number of financial transactions that federal campaigns and committees reported to the FEC: up from 45 million to 503 million, according to agency budget data.

Its budget has also stagnated: In fiscal year 2026, the FEC’s budget stood at about $80.9 million — unchanged from 2025 and 2024 and millions less than the agency had previously requested from Congress. The dollar figure is also down from the FEC’s nearly $81.7 million funding level in fiscal year 2023.Meanwhile, the FEC employed a staff of 250 as of January. That’s the agency’s lowest staffing complement since fiscal year 1990, years before the advent of digital fundraising, super PACs or “dark money,” a time when seven-figure congressional campaigns were rare and political contributions were generally transacted using paper checks and cash.

In its April 2026 budget justification to Congress for $87.8 million, the FEC warned that next year’s proposed funding by Trump’s Office of Management and Budget — $73.9 million — “would risk the FEC’s ability to meet its mission and statutory requirements.”

There’s “a very real risk that the FEC will be reduced to just its data collection function,” said Daniel Weiner, a former FEC senior counsel and current director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Elections and Government Program.

Congress has long ignored the FEC. At times, lawmakers have gone years without conducting a single oversight hearing.

A particularly stark example of Congress’ indifference is its consistent failure — whether Capitol Hill was controlled by Democrats or Republicans — to act on dozens of formal legislative recommendations the commission has unanimously made over the years.

The FEC’s most recent slate of recommendations, made in December 2024, included requests to prohibit foreign contributions for ballot initiatives, prohibit “fraudulent” political action committee practices, withhold political contributors’ street addresses from public disclosure for safety purposes and increase commissioner and staff salaries.

They’ve gone nowhere.

There have also been three shutdowns at the FEC during Trump’s time in the White House, each for lack of enough commissioners.

The first lasted 266 days, from Aug. 26, 2019, to May 18, 2020.

The second lasted 159 days, from July 3, 2020 to Dec. 9, 2020.

The third will pass 365 days on May 1, with no end in sight.

The FEC has not had a quorum of commissioners for about 41 percent of the time Trump has been president across his two terms.

More acutely, the FEC has not had a quorum for nearly 80 percent of Trump’s second term.

Even if the FEC regains a quorum this year, there’s no guarantee it will persist: another commissioner could resign or Trump could choose to remove someone who crosses him, as he did in 2025.

The FEC’s dysfunction “makes following the law optional. It emboldens folks who are most inclined to violate the law,” said Ellen Weintraub, a Democratic FEC commissioner who served from 2002 to 2025, leaving when Trump ousted her last year — a move she decried as illegal.

But Brad Smith, president of the Institute for Free Speech and a former Republican FEC chair, told NOTUS that “no decent attorney is going to tell a client to go ahead and violate the law because there is no quorum now.”

The White House declined to comment on the FEC beyond acknowledging that Trump had in February nominated two commissioner candidates.

Congressional elections during 2026 are certain to generate billions of dollars worth of spending, including from a variety of sources, such as super PACs and politically minded nonprofit organizations, that trade in money almost impossible to trace back to a root source.

Several former FEC commissioners and attorneys noted that federal courts will increasingly fill voids created by the FEC’s chronic shutdowns, particularly when someone is alleging wrongdoing by a political candidate or committee.

Tom Moore, a former FEC staffer and current senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, noted that Congress allows a complainant to sue a respondent directly in situations where the FEC can’t or won’t act on a campaign finance-related complaint.

“That mechanism,” he said, “exists precisely for moments like this one.”

But what if the FEC simply remains crippled for the entire 2026 midterms — or longer?

“Life goes on in the absence of [an] FEC,” said Lee Goodman, a partner at Dhillon Law Group and former Republican FEC chair, “which does beg the question whether the FEC is essential to a functioning democracy.”