Early in Trump's second term, political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security asked the federal agency that guards America's elections against hackers to do something unusual: secretly acquire a voting machine, hack it, and send what it found to the White House.

That's according to a ProPublica investigation published this month, based on two former administration officials who knew about the request. The agency is the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA. Its whole job on elections is to stop hackers. And the agency had been directed not to warn the voting machine company if it found any flaws — the opposite of what the agency normally does.

"My thought was they could keep it in their back pocket to invalidate any [election] results they don't like," one of the former officials told ProPublica. "This goes against everything CISA represents."

Why it didn't happen

The hack never went forward. Career staff told the appointees it was impossible, partly because the agents who could have done it had just been laid off by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency. Eventually, the appointees stopped asking.

That's the other half of this story. While Trump's people were looking for ways to use the agency against the vote, they were tearing apart its ability to protect it.

What they did to the agency

Trump signed the law that created CISA in 2018. In 2020, it vouched for that election as "the most secure in American history," and when its director publicly rebutted the fraud claims coming out of the White House, Trump fired him over Twitter.

In his second term, ProPublica found:

• More than 1,000 CISA employees have been laid off or pushed out — about a third of the agency.
• DOGE laid off people critical to the agency's election work, including those who had worked closely with states.
• The administration cut funding for the sensors that watched election networks for hackers — which, ProPublica writes, left the federal government blind to breaches it had been catching.
• Trump's 2027 budget would cut CISA by another $700 million, which could mean 900 more layoffs.

Then, for the midterms, the agency simply wasn't there. Several state election officials told ProPublica that CISA gave them no help and no explanation during the most important months of planning. "There is a difference between deprioritizing and being nonexistent," said Ryan Macias, an election-security expert who has worked as a consultant for CISA. Through mid-September 2026, he said, "they were nonexistent. Literally nonexistent."

"What they've done is basically cut us off and left us on our own," said Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes.

CISA didn't publish its election security plan until September 24. In past years, it had finished almost all its work with the states by Labor Day.

They also handed out the states' secrets

For years, states shared sensitive information about weak spots in their voting systems with CISA, on one promise: it would stay private. This year, to back up Trump's claims about 2020, the administration published records that included raw information states had given the agency — including a log of what was being monitored in several states on Election Day 2020.

"It betrayed the trust of all partners who were willing to share information at the time," said Geoff Hale, who worked on CISA's elections team from the start until last year. The White House told ProPublica that releasing the records was "exactly the sort of transparency news organizations should applaud."

Who's in charge now? CISA's acting director, Nick Andersen, is also a district representative for the Republican Party in Virginia, according to ProPublica. In March, he gave a speech to the Fairfax GOP chapter titled "Fighting Democrat Redistricting." When he finally met with state election officials by video this summer — with primaries already underway — Fontes told him he didn't trust him.

A pattern, not a one-off

This fits everything else the administration has done to the people who run our elections. Trump's Homeland Security secretary has threatened state election officials with prison if they don't hand over voter data and let Washington run "security enhancements" on their voting machines. The Justice Department is sending criminal prosecutors to watch polling places. And ProPublica reports that Tulsi Gabbard, while director of national intelligence, led an operation to seize election machines in Puerto Rico — and that after the contractor hired to examine them found nothing to support the 2020 claims, the government stopped renewing its contract, according to the contractor's CEO. (Gabbard's office says the contract had simply been completed.)

State officials told ProPublica they can still run a secure election without CISA's help. What they and security experts fear is what comes after: that Trump will say the election was hacked if Republicans lose in November.

What we know

According to ProPublica, Trump's DHS appointees asked CISA — the agency that protects elections from hackers — to secretly acquire and hack a voting machine and report back to the White House, and dropped it after staff said it was impossible — in part because DOGE had already laid off the agents who could have done it. The administration has cut about a third of CISA's workforce and its election-network monitoring, gave states no help for most of the midterm planning, and published sensitive information states had shared in confidence.

Source

How the Trump Administration Politicized the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — ProPublica