As FEC workload soared, it lost 52 staff in 15 months
Summary
The Federal Election Commission's own inspector general reports that campaign committee receipts hit $28.3 billion in the 2024 cycle -- a more than 9,000% increase since 1976 -- and that the FEC's Reports Analysis Division reviewed 164.5 million pages of filings that same cycle, nearly ten times its 2008 workload. Over that same stretch the FEC's own workforce has been shrinking, and between October 2024 and December 2025 the agency lost 52 staff -- nearly double its recent average pace -- taking an estimated 811 years of institutional knowledge with them.
More money, more paperwork, same-sized watchdog
Federal campaigns raised and spent about $300 million in 1976⧉, the first presidential cycle after the FEC was created. By 2024, campaign committee receipts reached $28.3 billion. The number of transactions the FEC must regulate grew even faster in relative terms -- from about 340,000 in 1978 to 502.7 million by 2024, a nearly 1,500-fold increase, with the 2020 cycle setting the all-time record at over 630 million transactions. Nearly every one of those filings passes through the FEC's Reports Analysis Division (RAD), which reviewed 144,166 individual documents in the 2008 cycle and 196,175 by 2024 -- a 36% increase in document count that undersells the real story: the page count behind those documents grew from 15,034,325 in 2008 to 164,502,936 in 2024, a 994% increase, after peaking at 261,585,475 pages in the record 2020 cycle. The notes the FEC's overall workforce has been shrinking over the last decade even as this workload climbed.
View data as table
| 2008 cycle | 15,034,325 |
|---|---|
| 2020 cycle (record high) | 261,585,475 |
| 2024 cycle | 164,502,936 |
Then 52 people left in 15 months
Between October 1, 2024 and December 31, 2025, 52 FEC employees separated or were scheduled to separate⧉ -- through the federal deferred resignation program, voluntary buyouts, retirements, transfers, or standard departures. The calls that nearly double the agency's average separation pace in recent years (a 12-month average of 24.4 separations, against this 15-month count of 52; annualized, the acceleration is closer to 1.7 times the average pace, still a sharp jump). No office was untouched. The Offices of the Commissioners lost the most staff, 14, largely because four of the FEC's six Commissioners left the agency during the period; the Office of Compliance and the Office of General Counsel each lost 13 more.
View data as table
| Offices of the Commissioners | 14 |
|---|---|
| Office of Compliance | 13 |
| Office of General Counsel | 13 |
| Office of the Staff Director | 6 |
| Office of the Chief Information Officer | 4 |
| Office of the Chief Financial Officer | 2 |
811 years, and staff say they feel it
The puts a number on what walked out the door: a combined 811 years of institutional knowledge and government experience⧉ among the 52 departed employees. In the 's own July 2025 risk-assessment survey of FEC staff, 75% of respondents who answered an open-ended question about organizational risk cited budget, resource, or staffing concerns, and 45% said staffing in their own division wasn't sufficient to complete assigned work. The 's conclusion is blunt: the agency's leaders now have to run the FEC's mission with meaningfully fewer people than it had for most of the last decade, at the exact moment the money and paperwork the agency oversees are at or near all-time highs.
The takeaway
- The oversight target grew by orders of magnitude. Campaign receipts are up more than 9,000% since 1976, and the FEC's own filing-review division handled nearly ten times the paperwork in 2024 that it did in 2008.
- The watchdog didn't grow with it -- it shrank. The FEC's workforce has been declining for a decade, and 52 more staff left in the 15 months ending December 2025, taking an estimated 811 years of institutional knowledge with them.
- Staff feel the gap. In the 's own survey, 3 in 4 respondents named budget or staffing as a top organizational risk, and nearly half said their own division didn't have enough people to do its work.
All findings are from the FEC Office of Inspector General's "Management and Performance Challenges Facing the FEC for FY 2026"⧉, published December 15, 2025 under the Reports Consolidation Act of 2000. This article draws on two of the report's five identified challenge areas -- Resource Management and Growth of Election Contributions. The report's separate Loss of Quorum and Loss of Bipartisan Membership challenge, and its effect on FEC enforcement activity, is covered elsewhere on this site using the FEC's own quarterly enforcement-statistics reports.
Sources(1) ▾
- Federal Election Commission, Office of Inspector General, Management and Performance Challenges Facing the FEC for FY 2026 (2025-12-15) — The FEC 's statutorily required (Reports Consolidation Act of 2000) annual report identifying the Commission's most serious management and performance challenges, published December 15, 2025 and included in the FEC's Agency Financial Report. This article draws on two of the report's five challenge areas -- Resource Management (staff separations) and Growth of Election Contributions (workload growth) -- not the report's quorum/bipartisan-membership challenge, which this newsroom has covered separately via the FEC's own enforcement statistics. fec.gov · original document
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The Federal Election Commission's own inspector general⧉ lays out a widening gap: the money and paperwork the agency oversees have grown by orders of magnitude, while the staff overseeing it has been shrinking. Campaign committee receipts hit $28.3 billion in the 2024 presidential cycle -- more than a 9,000% increase since 1976. Over that same long climb, the FEC's Reports Analysis Division saw its own workload grow nearly 1,000% by page count. Then, between October 2024 and December 2025, the agency lost 52 staff -- nearly double its recent average attrition pace.