Former Republican FEC Officials Push Senate to Confirm Trump’s Nominees

A group of Republican former Federal Election Commission officials is urging the Senate’s top Republican to quickly confirm President Trump’s nominees to the agency before Democrats officially take the Senate majority in January.

In a letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.), 10 former FEC commissioners warned that a failure to confirm Ashley Stow and Andrew Woodson to the commission before the next Congress is sworn in could thwart the nominations “indefinitely” and further prolong a lack of quorum at the agency that’s already lasted more than a year and a half.

“The present situation is increasingly untenable,” the former commissioners wrote. ”For more than a year, the Commission has lacked the quorum necessary to conduct much of its core business.”

Among the signatories to the letter were Sean Cooksey, the former Republican FEC commissioner who left the agency at the beginning of Trump’s second term in the White House to serve as counsel to Vice President J.D. Vance; Allen Dickerson, whose resignation from the FEC last year cost it its quorum; and Trey Trainor, who left the FEC last year to mount an unsuccessful bid for a Texas congressional seat. 

Trump nominated Stow and Woodson to the commission in February, nearly 10 months after Dickerson left the commission. But the Republican-controlled Senate, which is responsible for confirming the president’s nominees, hasn’t taken action on the nominations. 

Senate Republicans are now up against the clock to wrap up unfinished business after Democrats decisively captured House and Senate majorities in this week’s midterm elections. Democrats are so far set to hold 54 Senate seats, and could potentially gain up to two more if the party’s candidates in Mississippi and Alaska end up winning their races.

The FEC requires at least four commissioners in order to conduct high-level business, like issuing advisory opinions. There are currently just two commissioners at the agency, Shana Broussard and Dara Lindenbaum, both of whom are Democrats.

Since the FEC lost its quorum last year, it has also racked up an ever-growing backlog of enforcement cases. CBS News reported in October that the number of cases had doubled in a year, from 154 to 307. 

In their letter to Thune, the former Republican FEC commissioners also cited a suspected hacking incident that led to outages to the commission’s electronic filing system just days before the Nov. 3 midterm elections. “Regardless of the ultimate scope of that incident,” the former commissioners wrote, “it is a stark reminder that the Commission is responsible not only for interpreting and enforcing federal campaign-finance law, but also for maintaining critical systems through which the American public receives campaign-finance information.”

Tuesday’s elections marked an end to the 2026 political cycle and the beginning of the 2028 cycle, which will include a presidential contest that’s almost sure to break political spending records. Without a quorum at the FEC, the letter reads, Republicans could face a “politically untenable scenario” heading into 2028. 

“Republicans have long defended the FEC’s bipartisan structure because it prevents either political party from exercising biased control over federal campaign-finance regulation and enforcement,” the former commissioners wrote. “But that structure protects against partisan administration only when the Commission has a bipartisan quorum.” 

“A bipartisan agency deliberately designed to require four votes cannot fulfill its statutory role with only two Commissioners.”