Donald Trump’s second spin in the White House has been mired in high-profile incidents of graft and corruption, like the family’s tech stock profiteering, or the now-infamous TrumpCoin scandal. But the president’s latest grift goes far beyond personal wheeling and dealing, extending into the very machines some 174 million voting-aged Americans could use to cast their ballots.
A bombshell investigation by ProPublica revealed that Trump’s cabinet goons overseeing the Department of Homeland Security instructed their underlings to procure a voting machine — and figure out how to hack it.
Specifically, the ProPublica investigation found that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), a component of the DHS, was tasked with acquiring a voting machine and reporting its security flaws back to the White House. The revelation comes from two former government officials — speaking anonymously to avoid retaliation — who noted that CISA insiders were outraged at the order.
“My thought was they could keep it in their back pocket to invalidate any [election] results they don’t like,” one of the former officials told ProPublica.
Ironically, the initiative was reportedly complicated by the fact that Elon Musk’s DOGE squad had laid off the CISA agents who would have known how to actually break into voting machines. As a result, the agents who received the order had to repeatedly tell White House officials that the request was impossible.
Per ProPublica, CISA has engaged in security discussions with state governments and voting machine vendors over potential exploits for years. Now, key players involved in overseeing federal election equipment say CISA has left them high and dry for over a year, with zero explanation for their absence during a crucial election season.
“There is a difference between deprioritizing and being nonexistent,” CISA cybersecurity and election consultant Ryan Macias told ProPublica. During the run-up to the crucial US midterm elections between 2025 and September 2026, Macias says the once-reliable CISA experts “were nonexistent. Literally nonexistent.”
Those relationships took years of communication and trust-building to establish — something the Trump administration is apparently happy to discard in record time.
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