ELECTION SECURITYElection Officials Blast Trump’s “Retreat” from Protecting Voting Against Foreign Threats
The Trump administration has begun dismantling the nation’s defenses against foreign interference in voting, a sweeping retreat that has alarmed state and local election officials. The administration is shuttering the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force and last week cut more than 100 positions at the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
The Trump administration has begun dismantling the nation’s defenses against foreign interference in voting, a sweeping retreat that has alarmed state and local election officials.
The administration is shuttering the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force and last week cut more than 100 positions at the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. President Donald Trump signed the law creating the agency in 2018. Among its goals is helping state and local officials protect voting systems.
Secretaries of state and municipal clerks fear those moves could expose voter registration databases and other critical election systems to hacking — and put the lives of election officials at risk.
In Pennsylvania, Republican Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt said states need federal help to safeguard elections from foreign and domestic bad actors.
“It is foolish and inefficient to think that states should each pursue this on their own,” he told Stateline. “The adversaries that we might encounter in Pennsylvania are very likely the same ones they’ll encounter in Michigan and Georgia and Arizona.”
Officials from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, known as CISA, and other federal agencies were notably absent from the National Association of Secretaries of State winter meeting in Washington, D.C., earlier this month. Those same federal partners have for the past seven years provided hacking testing of election systems, evaluated the physical security of election offices, and conducted exercises to prepare local officials for Election Day crises, among other services for states that wanted them.
But the Trump administration thinks those services have gone too far.
In a Feb. 5 memo, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said the administration is dismantling the FBI’s task force “to free resources to address more pressing priorities, and end risks of further weaponization and abuses of prosecutorial discretion.” The task force was launched in 2017 by then-FBI Director Christopher Wray, a Trump nominee.
In her confirmation hearing last month, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said CISA has “gotten far off-mission.” She added, “They’re using their resources in ways that was never intended.” While the agency should protect the nation’s critical infrastructure, its work combating disinformation was a step too far, she said.
This echoes the language from the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 document, which has driven much of the Trump administration’s policies. “The Left has weaponized [CISA] to censor speech and affect elections at the expense of securing the cyber domain and critical infrastructure,” it says.
