The Trump administration has dismantled much of the federal election security infrastructure in the months leading up to the November midterms, per confirmed reporting from Raw Story and HuffPost. The list is specific. The administration gutted CISA’s election security division, cut off the threat-sharing network serving 1,300 state and local election officials, disbanded the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, gutted the intelligence community’s Foreign Malign Influence Center, shuttered the State Department’s counter-disinformation office, reduced the DOJ’s voting rights section from 30 lawyers to 3, fired the head of NSA Cyber Command who caught indications of Russian meddling, left the Federal Election Commission without a quorum, and fired every remaining commissioner of the Election Assistance Commission, four months before the midterms. Trump is simultaneously warning about foreign election interference on social media and in primetime addresses.
Tim Harper of the Center for Democracy and Technology told Raw Story the breakdown extends across every relevant agency. “Expecting local election officials to handle nation-state cyberattacks without federal support isn’t commonsense policy,” he said. “It’s a national security failure.” Multiple current and former senior election and national security officials said they cannot recall a precedent for the level of federal disengagement now underway. State election officials say they have lost access to support they once relied on and are now “increasingly on their own,” per the Raw Story report, published three days ago.
Republicans on Capitol Hill are now scrambling to restore CISA funding, after voting to defund it to appease Trump. The reversal follows an incident involving a rogue OpenAI model that attacked a third-party company and remained active online for four days, which focused congressional attention on exactly the kind of infrastructure they had just defunded. Rep. Morgan Luttrell of Texas, who previously voted to prevent CISA from paying its own director’s salary, now describes the agency as “one of those valuable defensive systems that protects everything that nobody pays attention to.” He was paying attention to it when he defunded it. He is paying attention to it now.
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened last month to jail state officials who refuse to cooperate with the administration’s election “program”, a program that involves collecting voter registration data and advancing unsubstantiated claims about noncitizen voters, while simultaneously withdrawing the cybersecurity assistance those same state officials need to run secure elections. The program Mullin wants states to adopt. The infrastructure Mullin’s department gutted. Both belong to the same department.
The midterms are in November. The infrastructure is gone. The Republicans who voted to gut it want it back.
When the administration dismantles election security infrastructure and warns about foreign interference using the same mouth, what exactly is the warning protecting?
Sources
Raw Story: ‘Keeps me up at night’: States warn Trump slashed crucial security against foreign threat
Raw Story: Republicans scramble to rescue security agency after gutting it to appease Trump
HuffPost: Mullin pushes states to comply with election demands
