Executive Orders Rewired Who Controls Campaign Finance Rules
A February 2025 executive order handed the White House formal veto power over FEC rulemaking, and a companion August memo directed the attorney general to investigate political grantees — creating...
The single most documented fact in this investigation is also the most structurally consequential: on February 18, 2025, President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order that, according to a legal analysis published four days later by Covington & Burling's Inside Political Law practice, gives the president 'veto power over some FEC rulemaking.' That assessment was not issued by a partisan watchdog. It came from one of the nation's oldest election law firms, whose client base spans both parties.
The Federal Election Commission was designed, by statute, to be insulated from exactly this kind of executive reach. Under the Federal Election Campaign Act, no more than three of the agency's six commissioners may belong to the same political party, and most significant enforcement actions require a four-vote supermajority. That architecture exists because Congress, in creating the FEC, made a deliberate choice: campaign finance law should not be interpreted, enforced, or revised at the pleasure of whoever occupies the White House. The February 18 order does not repeal that statute. It works around it. By requiring the FEC to submit 'significant regulatory actions' to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs — an OMB body that has traditionally reviewed executive agencies, not independent ones — the order inserts a White House chokepoint into the FEC's rulemaking pipeline. The order further declares, per the Congressional Research Service's summary in CRS Product R41542, that 'the President or the Attorney General shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch,' explicitly including the FEC among covered agencies.
The ranking members of both the House Committee on Administration and the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration wrote to FEC commissioners opposing compliance with the order, according to CRS R41542. Their letter expressed 'great concerns' about FEC deference to the executive — though the full text of that letter, and the names of the signing members, are not available in the public record compiled for this report. More critically, whether the FEC actually submitted any rulemaking to OIRA, or deferred to any AG interpretation, has not been publicly documented. That compliance question is the central unresolved factual issue in this story.
Six days before the Covington analysis published, the administration executed a second structural move. In February 2025, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced the disbanding of the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force, the interagency body that, per CRS Product R45302, 'previously served to coordinate bureau activities to identify and counter foreign interference.' The Task Force's mandate included enforcement of 52 U.S.C. § 30121, the federal statute prohibiting contributions and donations by foreign nationals. Political advertising on broadcast and digital platforms is the primary conduit through which foreign money, if laundered through domestic intermediaries, reaches U.S. elections. Removing the coordinating enforcement body does not make the underlying statute disappear — but it does make detection and prosecution of violations substantially harder. CRS, in Product R45302, states with notable hedging that 'it appears that some of the executive branch activities aimed at combatting foreign interference during the 2020 and 2024 election cycles have been curtailed or eliminated.' No inventory of those eliminated programs has been made public.
The third instrument arrived in August 2025. A White House Presidential Memorandum, published at whitehouse.gov under the title 'Use of Appropriated Funds for Illegal Lobbying and Partisan Political Activity by Federal Grantees,' directed the attorney general to investigate whether federal grant recipients are using appropriated funds to support lobbying activities in violation of 31 U.S.C. § 1352, the Byrd Amendment. The operative text, published verbatim by the White House, reads: 'I hereby direct the Attorney General, in consultation with the heads of executive departments and agencies, to investigate whether Federal grant funds are being used to illegally support lobbying activities and to take appropriate enforcement action.' The AG is required to report findings to the president within 180 days — meaning the report was due approximately in February 2026. That report, if it exists, has not been made public. The statute being enforced is real. The question of selective enforcement — which grantees are selected for scrutiny, by what criteria, and reported to whom — is the question the statute itself does not answer.
Taken together, the three instruments create a coherent structural architecture. The February executive order constrains what the FEC can promulgate in campaign finance regulation without executive review. The disbanding of the Foreign Influence Task Force reduces law enforcement capacity to detect the foreign money that such regulations are designed to exclude. The August memorandum deploys the attorney general — now operating as an interpretive authority over the FEC under the same executive order — as an investigative instrument against grant-funded organizations engaged in political activity, without publicly disclosed targeting criteria. The Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, in its report 'Limiting Secret Money in Politics,' assessed that the FEC had already 'effectively worked against transparency and disclosure through inaction' before these 2025 actions. The 2025 instruments accelerate and institutionalize a trajectory that predated them.
What remains hidden is substantial. The specific FEC regulatory actions, if any, that were submitted to OIRA under the February order are not publicly disclosed. The names of the congressional members who objected, and the full text of their letter, are not in the public record. The investigations initiated under the August memorandum, and the identities of targeted grantees, have not been disclosed. The AG's 180-day report to the president has not been published. The instrument that would force disclosure of the OIRA review process is a Freedom of Information Act request to OMB for all FEC-related submissions received after February 18, 2025. The instrument that would reveal the scope of the August memorandum investigations is a FOIA request to the Department of Justice's Public Integrity Section for all investigative referrals generated pursuant to that memorandum. Neither has yet produced a public record.