Trump administration halted CISA's election security support to states, ending the agency's congressionally mandated protection of voting systems

On March 11, 2025, a U.S. official confirmed to Votebeat that CISA had halted all election security support to state and local officials, ending programs the agency had operated since its creation following the 2016 Russian election interference campaign. The agency had ceased participating in National Association of Secretaries of State and National Association of State Election Directors conferences and stopped providing direct cybersecurity assistance — including threat intelligence, vulnerability scanning, and on-site support — to state election offices.

The halt came after a series of earlier actions by the Trump administration to strip CISA of its election security capacity. On February 11, 2025, CISA election security and disinformation officials were placed on administrative leave. Around the same time, DHS moved to terminate twelve CISA employees who had been involved in monitoring election-related misinformation and issued a directive to pause all election security activities. DOGE-directed workforce reductions had further cut into CISA's election security staffing.

Congress established CISA in 2018 with a statutory mandate to designate and protect critical infrastructure, including election systems, which had been classified as critical infrastructure in 2017 following the Russian interference campaign targeting the 2016 election. No congressional action authorized the administration to withdraw this protection. State election officials said the cutoff left them without federal cybersecurity support they had depended on to secure voting systems and procedures against foreign cyberattacks ahead of future elections.

Updates

2026-01-15 — Election officials declared trust in CISA's election security support broken, citing ten months without federal assistance [6]

State and local election officials from multiple states publicly declared in interviews with Votebeat that the Trump administration's elimination of CISA's election security programs had permanently damaged their relationship with the federal government. Officials said they could no longer rely on CISA for threat intelligence, vulnerability scanning, or on-site support, and had begun building independent state-level cybersecurity programs to replace the federal assistance.

2026-06-10 — Senate Democrats demanded DHS answers on CISA election security preparations ahead of 2026 midterms [7]

Senators Alex Padilla, Mark Warner, and Gary Peters sent formal letters to the Department of Homeland Security demanding answers about the administration's sustained dismantling of CISA's election security programs ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, warning that the pullback left voting infrastructure vulnerable to foreign interference.