Two years ago, the government agency at the forefront of election security did what it had done for every federal election cycle since 2018.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency set up a digital and physical war room, to quickly swap insights and intelligence with state and local officials; updated reporters every few hours on problems occurring nationwide; and sought to educate the public about foreign disinformation campaigns and the resiliency of the United States’ voting process.
But on Tuesday the agency, established by President Trump in his first term, will be largely absent from the action, current and former CISA officials say, weakening the federal government’s ability to help states respond to problems ranging from routine vote-machine disruptions to online hoaxes to bad actors looking to undermine public confidence in the vote. Instead, it is expected to offer light assistance to state and local election officials, many of whom fear the federal government is more likely to meddle with election results than to help safeguard them. There will be no scheduled briefings with reporters, an agency spokesman confirmed on Monday.
“The posture seems like the bare minimum,” said Geoff Hale, a former top election security official at CISA. Such an approach to election security, he said, was not well suited to identifying problems that cut across multiple voting jurisdictions or “the type of national security concerns that once drove the mission.”
It is a remarkable retreat from the agency’s history as a loud and visible presence around Election Day across both the first Trump and Biden administrations.
CISA, the cyber wing of the Department of Homeland Security, was a lead federal partner for states on election security efforts after the 2016 election, sharing cybersecurity best practices and intelligence about foreign intentions around elections. The agency’s leadership and election security advisers painstakingly worked to build trusted relationships with Republican, Democratic and nonpartisan state and local officials, eventually smoothing out concerns among many of them worried about federal intervention in elections, which the Constitution says are overseen by individual states.
But Mr. Trump developed disdain for the agency, and for the government’s election security work generally. Its director at the time, Christopher Krebs, validated the integrity of the 2020 election, prompting the president to fire him.
During Mr. Trump’s second term, the agency has been largely rudderless, with no Senate-confirmed leader. It has continued to be sidelined on elections, even as Mr. Trump gave a prime-time address this summer in which he exaggerated claims about election vulnerabilities and vowed to fix security issues.
Much of its work on election security was gutted as the administration systematically dismantled the expertise built up at the agency. Staff reductions and budget cuts hit deeper than at other offices within the Department of Homeland Security or the broader federal government — CISA shed about a third of its work force, which stood at 3,400 in January 2025. In February last year, the administration put more than a dozen CISA election security workers on leave as part of an investigation into its election work, a move that had a chilling effect on the 100 or so people in the division, former officials said.
While CISA has recently hired some new personnel, the jobs are not for election security positions, current and former officials said.
Other federal agencies have also downsized their election security work, including the F.B.I. and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. But CISA, as the public-facing arm of the federal government’s election protection efforts, has made cuts that state and local officials have felt the most.
Among other changes, the agency ended the voluntary cybersecurity reviews it had offered to state and local jurisdictions for election systems. In some locations, though, they continued if local officials requested generic cybersecurity reviews for a courthouse or other state building that housed election tabulation machines, instead of specifically requesting help for an election.
And the regular flow of intelligence warnings, prepared by spy agencies and passed to local officials by CISA, slowed to a trickle, according to election experts.
In a statement, a CISA spokesman said it was “fully equipped and prepared to address any national security cyber threats that face our nation,” and described the agency as “stronger than ever” despite the staff reductions.
“Our regional teams assist partners across the country by assessing risks, helping entities strengthen their defenses and resilience, and responding promptly to threats,” the spokesman said. “As CISA has routinely done for previous elections, the agency has activated an incident coordination group before and on Election Day to support election officials and maintain a unified operational picture.”
CISA is treating the midterm elections as a “one-day hurricane,” said a current official at the agency, who was granted anonymity to speak freely. In practice, that means that regional personnel are expected to be on hand to lend help to states as requested on cybersecurity or physical security issues as they arise. But there is no coordinated national war room effort as there has been during every election cycle since 2018, the official said.
The lack of briefings to the news media will leave a vacuum of reliable federal information on Election Day, former officials and election experts said.
“They don’t have the expertise anymore,” said Mr. Hale, now a visiting fellow on election security at the Center for Democracy & Technology. “But they were a value add amid the fog of an election.”
Officials from the agency note that since Mr. Trump took office, their regional teams have conducted 700 engagements — including planning events, training sessions, and cyber and physical security assessments — with state, local and federal partners. The agency, officials said, continues to pass on warnings and provide technical guidance.
Former officials and election experts said that there was a low bar for what qualified as an “engagement.” Regardless, they added, the figure was low given the number of election jurisdictions nationwide, which some estimates put between 8,000 and 10,000.
Internally, employees acknowledge that little has been done to help states ahead of the midterms, current and former agency officials said. Election experts and local officials say that much of the engagement that took place this year was not helpful for this election, but could potentially be useful for the 2028 presidential election.
In 2020, during the first Trump term, the agency released its election security plan that February. This year, it was issued in late September. It contained minimal information that was new or helpful, election experts said.
In some ways, CISA’s help may be less needed today than in the past. States have improved their election security efforts considerably since revelations of Russian interference operations emerged a decade ago. They also have better protocols today than before Russia sought to interfere in the 2016 election.
But the federal government has returned to its posture before the 2016 cycle, former CISA officials said, no longer regularly sharing intelligence with states about foreign threats or convening election officials to address local and state issues as they arose.
“While the federal government may be back to its 2016 understanding of elections, states aren’t there — they are better postured to defend themselves,” Mr. Hale said. “There are more paper ballots than ever. There are more controls than ever. But that means that the one area that’s at its weakest is the cyberthreat information sharing, the understanding of adversaries and sharing of information about their plans and intentions.”
A recent interview with Nick Andersen, who is serving as both the acting director of CISA and its deputy director, underscored the agency’s rapid shift in approach under the second Trump administration.
Mr. Andersen, appearing on a podcast late last month to discuss the agency’s new cyber strategy, spoke for 10 minutes about its focus on protecting U.S. critical infrastructure. He discussed many aspects of CISA’s mission, including partnerships with the private sector, improving national resiliency to physical and cyber threats, and the integrity of essential services.
He made no mention of the election.
The post How a Beleaguered U.S. Cyber Agency Retreated From Election Security Work appeared first on New York Times.
