Federal Boards and Commissions: the Partisanship Issue

Many posts have discussed regulation and the administrative state. 

Chris Piper at the Partnership for Public Service:

Since returning to office, Trump has systematically targeted Democratic members of partisan-balanced boards and commissions. Now, nearly 40% of partisan-balanced boards and commissions have no Democratic members at all. This represents a rapid and historically unprecedented shift in the composition of bodies Congress designed to operate with bipartisan representation.

Of the 33 full-time boards and commissions, 23 include some form of partisan balancing requirement, typically limiting any one party to a bare majority of seats.

Partisan balancing requirements were designed not just to ensure representation, but to force internal contestation—replacing unilateral decision-making with structured disagreement and consensus building. Beyond cross-partisan deliberation, Congress has viewed partisan balancing as an “important restraint on the President from filling every commission seat with Administration partisans.”

In practice, presidents of both parties have historically maintained opposition-party representation, replacing members gradually as terms expired and often renominating incumbents. The Senate reinforced this practice through a long-standing norm of considering nominees to boards and commissions in bipartisan pairs. For example, through 2020, roughly 90% of Federal Election Commission members were confirmed this way.

Trump has abandoned these norms entirely. Since returning to office, he has fired or attempted to fire 16 Democratic members across 11 partisan-balanced boards and commissions while declining to nominate Democratic replacements. Over the same period, 12 new Republican members have been confirmed and zero Democrats.