President Trump says he’s worried about foreign interference in U.S. elections. That was the reason he gave when he released declassified intelligence documents last week which ended up undercutting his own baseless claims about “rigged” elections.

In his primetime address on July 16, Trump said the U.S. “must take urgent action” to protect voting infrastructure against foreign actors. But shortly after taking office last year, Trump gutted a key agency designed to protect America’s elections from exactly that. 

It’s called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — an agency created during Trump’s first term. CISA is one of the main federal partners for states on election security, sharing intelligence on potential threats to voting infrastructure and providing quick, regional support. 

After Trump returned to office, the cyber agency housed under the Department of Homeland Security took a major hit. Elon Musk’s DOGE fired more than 100 workers, including election security advisers. More than 600 others were placed on administrative leave, were reassigned or took buy-outs. 

Now, the Trump administration is telling states that they will only receive resources if they hand over voter rolls to be screened through a new federal database that a judge recently deemed unlawful in its current form.

That database is known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE), which experts and a federal judge are concerned has a high error rate that could disenfranchise voters. 

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said CISA will release an “election infrastructure plan” in the next 30 days — barely three months out from the midterms that will determine which party controls Congress.

“If they participate in the SAVE program, we’ll provide the resources and training to support state election integrity,” Mullin said last week. “We’re not trying to change the outcome.”

‘They’re flying blind’

Multiple current and former senior election and national security officials told MS NOW that they could not recall a time when the federal government held back resources and money meant to secure America’s elections. 

And multiple state election officials have said they are not receiving any briefings on possible foreign threats to election security from the federal government. Such briefings were once a regular occurrence, they said.

During the first Trump administration, “we were collaborative — carrots rather than sticks,” the former official said. The second Trump administration is “very much focused on sticks.”

One election official in a swing state said the difference from 2024 is stark, saying “it’s every state for themselves.” The official spoke on the condition of anonymity over concerns about retaliation from federal officials. Last cycle the state official had a regional federal cybersecurity expert “on speed dial” who could “see the whole puzzle.”

That doesn’t exist anymore and without it, the state election official said, “we’re less informed on the pattern of the attackers and are slower to respond.” 

“I’ve literally never heard anybody effectively say ‘to keep you safe,’ you have to give me what I want,’” said the swing-state election official, referring to DHS threats to withhold resources if states don’t hand over sensitive voter data. 

The risks compound at the local level. “Does [a clerk’s] laptop have the IT infrastructure to defend against an attack from Iran? That’s what keeps me up at night.”

Cait Conley, a West Point graduate and combat veteran who served as the Senior Adviser to the Director of CISA during the Biden administration, accused Trump of gutting the agency and sowing doubt about the security of U.S. elections in his speech last week. 

“If Donald Trump were truly concerned about election security, he would not have fired hundreds of federal workers whose jobs were to secure our elections,” said Conley, who is now running for Congress in New York as a Democrat. 

“His lies and misrepresentations are very clearly trying to lay the groundwork for calling this November’s election results into question when his party loses,” Conley said.

When asked about election officials telling MS NOW that they’ve received no intelligence briefings on possible foreign threats to election security, and have no access to regional cyber security advisers, DHS did not respond. They also did not respond directly to questions about the agency withholding resources unless states hand over voter data.

Instead, they provided a statement from acting CISA Director Nick Andersen, which said CISA “works with critical infrastructure owners and operators to assist them in securing both the physical security and cybersecurity of the systems and assets that support the nation’s elections.”

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When an election infrastructure plan is done in the next 30 days, it will “offer to states the cyber resources they need, including information about available no-cost voluntary services such as the sharing of threat information, technical expertise, vulnerability scanning, and other risk mitigation support,” Andersen said.

Under Trump, CISA halted its funding of the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, which provides local governments with free access to election security operations centers, election security training, technical support and threat monitoring.

Tim Harper, who leads the elections team at the nonpartisan Center for Democracy and Technology, said teams across the FBI, State Department and Justice Department that worked on countering foreign influence have also been eliminated or sidelined. 

But CISA was key to sharing and compiling intelligence across the federal government.

Parts of CISA’s election work, Harper explained, included granting security clearances to state election officials to give them real time information so they could stop threats before they spread. His organization has direct knowledge of officials receiving no response when they’ve asked the federal government to provide assistance on cyber and physical security.

“Expecting local election officials to handle nation-state cyber attacks without federal support isn’t common sense policy,” Harper said. “It’s a national security failure.”

States are trying to fill the gap with outside vendors and networks of cyber experts.

“It has taken a lot of work, and it shouldn’t have to be this hard, but the states are ensuring the 2026 election is secure despite federal withdrawal,” said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, which works with elections officials from both parties on ways to build trust with voters in election results.

Becker said the near-weekly threats of arrests of election officials by Trump administration officials has “become a running joke among election officials,” saying they find it “laughable.” 

Protecting elections

Established in 2018 during Trump’s first administration, CISA initially enjoyed sweeping bipartisan support. But Trump attacked the agency after its then-director, Chris Krebs, said the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history.” Trump, who lost the election, immediately fired Krebs.

After Trump returned to office in 2025, his administration proposed a 17% cut — roughly $500 million — in CISA’s budget. It also proposed mass layoffs that would cut CISA staff nearly 30%, eliminating 1,083 of its 3,732 staffers. The plan was paused after nearly 600 people accepted a buyout offer from the administration, Politico reported at the time.

Trump and members of his new administration have also accused CISA of undermining democracy instead of defending it. Then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, in a surprise keynote speech at a major cybersecurity conference last year, said the CISA’s efforts to counter the spread of misinformation from America’s enemies, such as Russia and China, was an infringement on free speech.

“They were deciding what was truth and what was not,” she said of CISA. “And it’s not the job of CISA to be the Ministry of Truth.”

Former CISA officials called those claims patently false. And they warned that tech firms were hiring top CISA leaders, as well as CISA staffers, due to their cybersecurity skills, and the agency was being gutted. 

“I’ve personally seen how CISA has lost its very best,” Jack Cable, a former CISA employee who left the agency in January, told lawmakers in a June hearing. “In the face of increasing threats, we can’t undermine the capacity of America’s cyber defense agency and its ability to attract and retain the best technical talent.”

David Rohde

David Rohde is the senior national security reporter for MS NOW and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. Previously he was the senior executive editor for national security and law for NBC News.