Don't call it a comeback

We've been here before, which begs the question: Will the Federal Election Commission actually enforce laws during the 2026 midterms?

(Photo illustration: Maklay62 / Creative Commons)

A funny thing about the Federal Election Commission, the agency that enforces and regulates the nation’s campaign finance laws: It’s rather easy for a president of the United States to effectively shut it down.

I’ll leave it to you to debate, discuss or ponder any motivations at play here.

But here are the facts to consider:

• President Donald Trump and his allied committees have faced dozens of complains before the FEC since he began running for president in 2015.

• Trump alone has the power to nominate commissioners to the bipartisan FEC, which is led by six commissioners, only three of whom may affiliate with any one political party. (Read: You can’t have a majority of Democrats or Republicans.)

• In 2019, the FEC basically shut down for nearly a year because it lacked the bare minimum number of commissioners — four — to establish a legal quorum. No quorum = no high-level actions such as advancing investigations, punishing scofflaws, finalizing audits, writing new rules, issuing formal advice to political committees or even conducting public meetings. This de facto shutdown ended when Trump, after delaying for months, made a nomination, which the Senate confirmed.

• In 2020, the FEC froze up again for several months after the agency again fell below the four-commissioner threshold. Trump again dallied for several months until making new nominations, with the Senate confirming them weeks later.

• In May 2025, the FEC experienced its third de facto shutdown when its complement of commissioners fell to three members. Later that year, Republican Trey Trainor, a Trump appointee form the president’s first term, resigned to run for Congress in Texas. At present, the FEC has two of its six commissioner slots filled. Both remaining commissioners are Democrats, Shana Broussard and Dara Lindenbaum.

• This week, more than nine months after the FEC most recently lost its quorum, Trump nominated two Republicans to the commission. These Republican nominees have been sitting on his desk for more than a year. How do we know this? Because I confirmed and reported this fact last summer. (See here.)

So where does this leave the nation’s beleaguered campaign finance enforcement agency as we enter the teeth of 2026 midterms?

That’s largely up to the Senate, which must consider and — if it chooses — confirm the two new Trump nominees, Andrew Woodson and Ashley Stow.

My NOTUS colleague Taylor Giorno and I broke news of Trump’s nomination of Woodson and Stow, and we detail here what to expect next.

In the meantime, the FEC remains crippled, with a massive case backlog continuing to grow. The agency can’t even defend itself in federal court, which it does with frequency and consequence. (You might, for example, recall the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.)

And all manner of hot, contemporary campaign issues — from AI-generated political ads to the roll of prediction markets in elections — march forward without the nation’s campaign money cop on its beat, however imperfect it may be even in the best of times.