Trump's federal shake-up sparks concerns among election experts

Election experts are sounding the alarm over the Trump administration’s wide-reaching changes to the federal bureaucracy, which is impacting the cybersecurity agency responsible for protecting the nation’s critical cyber and physical infrastructure.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has paused its election security work while it conducts a review of “all election security related funding, products, activities, and personnel.”

Election experts say service interruptions and changes could compromise the safety and security of U.S. elections. David Levine, a senior fellow at the University of Maryland’s Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement and a former election official, said the administration’s recent moves make U.S. elections "more vulnerable to attacks by malign actors, including foreign adversaries.”

“My concerns are that the recent efforts by the administration to dismantle federal election efforts raise questions about our ability to protect elections, our ability to combat disinformation, our ability for the federal government to provide security resources to state and local partners, to give specialized assistance and to be able to coordinate efforts to manage risk with election infrastructure,” Levine said.

CISA’s mission is to defend the country’s most important infrastructure, including election infrastructure. It was established in 2018 and is part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

CISA not only helps defend election infrastructure but has also worked to tackle election disinformation and misinformation, though Trump and the agency haven’t always seen eye to eye. Its first director, Chris Krebs, was fired after officials, include a top official at CISA, declared the 2020 election “was the most secure in American history” and that “there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”

The second Trump administration, with the help of Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has looked to reduce the size of the federal workforce to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse, and has landed its sights on agencies like CISA. The Associated Press reported last month that 17 CISA workers who were either regional election security specialists or those involved in its Election Security and Resilience team were placed on administrative leave.

CISA is also pausing its election security activities pending completion of a review.

“As the Administration has made clear, CISA will refocus on its mission starting with election security,” a DHS spokesperson told The Hill in a statement. The agency “has completed an initial review of its election security mission with a particular focus on work related to mis-, dis-, and malinformation” in accordance with a Trump order aimed at ending censorship and is “taking appropriate actions regarding employees found to have participated in these activities.”

“This is a critical part of a larger assessment of the election security work that the agency is undertaking to review all election security related funding, products, activities, and personnel. CISA has strategically paused all elections security activities pending the results of this review,” the spokesperson said.

The Trump administration’s posture toward CISA was not entirely unexpected. Newly confirmed DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said during her Senate hearing last month that CISA is “far off-mission.”

“They’re using their resources in ways that was never intended,” Noem, a staunch Trump ally, continued. “The misinformation and disinformation that they have stuck their toe into and meddled with should be refocused back onto what their job is, and that is to support critical infrastructure and to help our local and small businesses and critical infrastructure at the state level to have the resources and be prepared for those cyberattacks that they will face.”

In the meantime, election officials and groups are urging DHS to consider the value of CISA services.

The National Association of Secretaries of State in a Feb. 21 letter to Noem stressed that CISA has long helped state and local election officials defend against national security threats, including “sophisticated cyber threat actors.”

The bipartisan group’s letter pressed DHS to continue a number of “valuable” CISA services and information-sharing mechanisms that officials “regularly utilize,” ranging from physical security assessments to support for the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC).

Kim Wyman, a former Republican secretary of state in Washington state who also served as a senior election security adviser for CISA during the Biden administration, said one of the immediate consequences of pausing election security efforts and placing related staff on leave was “a complete loss of communication between state and local election offices and the federal government.”

“These relationships that all these local officials have been able to build over the last eight years with not only CISA, but through CISA, with the FBI and with the intelligence community in particular — there was a lot of information that was shared through vehicles like the” EI-ISAC, Wyman added.

EI-ISAC, a partnership with CISA, the Center for Internet Security (CIS) and the Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council, offered state and local officials cyber defense tools, threat monitoring and other services, but the recent CISA changes have choked off the initiative.

The DHS spokesperson told The Hill that CISA terminated federally funded activities supporting EI-ISAC after determining it “no longer effectuates Department priorities,” though it noted the CIS is not prohibited from managing the EI-ISAC on its own. The move also doesn't impact funding for the Multi-State Information and Analysis Center, a similar information-sharing group with a broader cybersecurity focus.

A notice on the CIS's website, though, reads that it “no longer supports EI-ISAC operations” due to the DHS funding cut.

Elections are primarily run by thousands of local offices across the country, many with small staffs who “don't have necessarily dedicated IT expertise, dedicated cyber security expertise, dedicated physical security expertise, all of these things that make sure that our election process is safe and secure against both foreign and domestic threats,” said Derek Tisler, counsel in the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.

“And especially since 2016, when election security was thrust into the spotlight more following more high-profile attempts by foreign adversaries to intervene in the process, the federal government has stepped in to fill this role.”

That means even small changes to election security work at CISA could have big impacts on local and state systems, which are already weathering high turnover among workers, harassment on the job and other strains.

“Faced with limited resources, state and local election officials across the country rely on CISA’s expertise,” nonpartisan election watchdog Verified Voting’s president and CEO Pamela Smith said in a statement calling on DHS to keep CISA’s “essential” election security work in place.

“Any reduction in these critical resources could make our elections more vulnerable and leave officials with fewer tools to protect our democratic process. Election security is national security — something every American has a stake in.”

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