When election officials in Arizona opened their online candidate portal last summer, it was immediately clear that it had been hacked. The photos of aspiring public servants had been replaced by red and black images of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran’s first supreme leader.
After similar episodes in recent years, state officials often contacted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, the primary federal agency responsible for election cybersecurity.
The agency, created by President Trump in 2018 to protect critical infrastructure, including elections, from cyberthreats, would have lent resources to stop the attackers and notified other election officials across the country so they could bolster their defenses.
But after the hack last summer, Adrian Fontes, Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, decided not to ask for CISA’s help. Arizona officials managed to stop the cyberattack, restore the website and ensure that no sensitive voter data had been compromised, though CISA might have been able to help them work faster and cheaper.
“They were sort of our one-stop-shop support, kind of standing by with this encyclopedia of potential resources,” Mr. Fontes said. But under the second Trump administration, he said, “that just has disappeared,” and he has lost trust in the agency.
Since returning to office, Mr. Trump has tried to bend election mechanics to his will, kicking off a redistricting war with little precedent, bombastically calling for elections to be “nationalized” and having the F.B.I. seize materials from the 2020 election in Georgia and Arizona. Outside the spotlight, his administration has effectively gutted election security infrastructure that Mr. Trump himself created in his first term, including CISA’s election team and a program responsible for sharing threat intelligence with state and local officials.
With less than eight months until the 2026 midterms, Republican and Democratic lawmakers and election officials across the country say that much of CISA’s support has disappeared, forcing them to prepare for an election without the agency as a trusted partner. They worry that elections will now be more susceptible to cyberattacks and foreign influence campaigns.
The administration says that it has not undermined CISA’s election security efforts. “Under President Trump, CISA is focused squarely on executing its statutory mission, including election security,” the agency said in a statement, contending that it is “delivering timely threat intelligence to our federal, state and local partners,” and “defending against both nation-state and criminal cyber threats.”
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, added: “The entire Trump administration is laser-focused on ensuring the safety and security of American elections.”
But even members of the president’s party have sounded the alarm.
“There’s no other agency equipped in the federal government to monitor electronic voting,” said Representative Michael McCaul, Republican of Texas, who led the legislative effort to create CISA in 2018.
“This is not an area of the federal government to be cutting back on,” he added.
The agency’s fate underlines how Mr. Trump has taken steps to undermine election security even as he has declared it an issue so important that he is threatening to hold up signing legislation on any other matter. And it shows how he turned against safety measures championed by election officials, including an agency he created.
Trump 1.0: CISA Is Born
After Russia’s attempts to influence the 2016 election, the federal government under President Barack Obama and then Mr. Trump explored ways to protect elections from cyberattacks and influence campaigns.
State and local election officials, who are responsible for running elections, worried that giving the federal government a larger role in elections could also infuse them with hyperpartisan national politics, giving federal officials an opportunity to politicize information and undermine trust.
“There was very much a feeling at the local and state level that we weren’t sure why the federal government wanted to be involved,” said Brianna L. Lennon, a longtime Missouri election official.
As the 2018 midterms neared, Mr. Trump took steps to champion security initiatives, and he delegated the tasks to people whom state and local officials grew to trust for their apolitical commitment to election integrity.
The activity included an F.B.I. task force to prevent foreign influence and a center to share threat intelligence with state and local officials. Mr. Trump also signed an executive order threatening sanctions on foreign governments engaged in election interference.
The efforts culminated with Mr. Trump’s signing CISA into law on Nov. 16, 2018. He called the legislation “vital.”
CISA quickly became a conduit for the federal government to distribute election security resources, and state and local officials readily accepted the free help.
There were early-warning sensors to detect breaches, intelligence sharing about foreign influence campaigns, a rumor control website and communications with social media companies to curb disinformation. On Election Day, officials gathered in a situation room, which election workers could call if they detected bomb threats or cyberattacks.
Leading into the 2020 election, CISA still had the Trump administration’s support, according to four senior U.S. officials involved in election security then.
But all that changed when Mr. Trump lost the election.
On Nov. 17, 2020, Mr. Trump fired CISA’s inaugural director, Christopher Krebs, after he refused to fall in line with the president’s false claims that the election was stolen from him.
The Biden Years: CISA Expands and Contracts
Under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., CISA tried to expand its offerings while managing backlash on the right, kicked off by Mr. Trump.
Before long, the Department of Homeland Security, CISA’s parent agency, ran into trouble. In spring 2022, the Biden administration tried to establish a panel to combat disinformation. Republicans, however, likened the panel, called the Disinformation Governance Board, to an Orwellian Ministry of Truth, and the Biden administration disbanded it.
In light of such criticism, CISA had stepped back from combating election disinformation by the 2022 midterms.
A patchwork of nongovernmental organizations, like the Center for Internet Security, tried to keep the work going. But under increased scrutiny after the election, even those efforts were scrapped.
In 2023, the Republican-led House Homeland Security Committee began investigating, as it described it, how CISA “enables the silencing of dissent” on the right.
A few months later, a Republican challenge seeking to prevent the government from contacting social media platforms to combat misinformation reached the Supreme Court.
Even though the court ruled in the Biden administration’s favor the following year, CISA continued to avoid combating misinformation.
In the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, CISA dispatched election security specialists across the country, held regular intelligence briefings and led an Election Day situation room.
Then Mr. Trump won.
Trump 2.0: CISA’s Decline
Since Mr. Trump’s return to office, nearly a third of CISA’s employees have been pushed out, its election security work has ground to a halt and deniers of the 2020 election results have been assigned to oversee election work.
Last April, Mr. Trump directed his administration to investigate “all of CISA’s activities over the last six years.”
For some on the right, the Trump administration’s swift actions were cause to celebrate. In June, Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, praised Mr. Trump for halting “censorship” by CISA. “I’m very proud that President Trump has said, ‘No more.’”
But other lawmakers condemned the move. “I don’t think the administration has tied the hands of the agency; I think they’ve chopped them off,” said Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon. He added that “we’re going to be less secure as a result of these practices and less ready for the safety of the midterm.”
The Midterms
As they prepare for an election without the backup from CISA that they are used to, election officials from both parties say the administration’s actions will leave American voters worse off.
“The guardrails going away is very concerning,” said Neal Kelley, a former Republican registrar of voters for Orange County, Calif. CISA’s measures made elections more secure, and losing them “can create holes,” he said.
Scott McDonell, a Democratic election official in Dane County, Wis., likened the situation to Aldous Huxley’s post-truth dystopian novel. “We’re sort of entering a brave new world,” he said.
The biggest concern for many state and local officials is that they will have limited visibility into nationwide cyberattacks or influence campaigns and will have difficulty coordinating defensive measures.
And little affronts are adding up, further eroding trust between CISA and state and local officials.
At a gathering for state election officials in January in Washington, Mr. Fontes recalled, the national intelligence director, homeland security secretary and attorney general were expected to speak. But the officials never showed.
“The thing that I miss the most is the knowledge that there is a federal agency that really cares about the safety and security of our elections in a genuine, nonpartisan way,” Mr. Fontes said. Instead, he said, all CISA used to do to secure elections “is like a tumbleweed in the distance, and it’s just getting smaller and smaller over the horizon.”
Adam Sella covers breaking news for The Times in Washington.
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