Since 2018, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has provided training and support for state elections officials to fight election interference.
But when Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows reached out last year ahead of its local elections, she said the agency was “suddenly unavailable.”
That’s because the Trump administration has dramatically reduced the agency, cutting its budget and a third of its staff, and freezing contracts.
“We were on our own,” Bellows said. “We have received zero guidance from the feds about CISA’s role in providing election security to the states.”
With the midterms coming up in November, state elections officials say that they are having to prepare for potential problems without as much federal assistance as they have had in the recent past, and that they are suspicious of the help that CISA may offer.
“There is a high level of distrust with what should be federal partners with state election officials,” an aide to a Republican secretary of state, who was granted anonymity to speak freely without fear of retaliation, told MS NOW.
The FBI has invited the chief elections officials of all 50 states to a phone call next week on preparations for the midterms.
When asked for comment, CISA said it is still offering “threat intelligence, expertise, no-cost tools and resources” to elections officials.
“Any claims that CISA is not communicating with our state and local partners is false,” a spokesperson told MS NOW.
Trump signed the law that created CISA after a bipartisan effort in response to Russian attempts to interfere with the 2016 election.
The agency drew his ire in 2020 when it pushed back against his baseless claims about the election.
But the agency drew his ire in 2020 when it pushed back against his baseless claims about the election by releasing a statement that called it “the most secure in American history” and debunking misinformation and conspiracy theories on its website.
Trump responded by firing CISA Director Chris Krebs a few weeks after the election, calling his assessment “highly inaccurate.” Last April, he went even further by revoking his security clearance and ordering an investigation into his tenure at CISA.
He also appointed Marci McCarthy, former chair of the DeKalb County Republican Party in Georgia, as the agency’s chief spokesperson.
After the 2020 election, McCarthy made expansive claims of mass voter fraud on social media, called the results “a little sketchy” and led a lawsuit that unsuccessfully challenged the use of Dominion voting machines, echoing conspiracy theories raised by Trump about the company.
This has raised concern among some elections officials that the agency created to combat misinformation about elections could end up promoting it.
“We’re suddenly preparing for 2026 for not only security concerns, but we have to safeguard against federal interference in the election itself,” Bellows told MS NOW.
Cait Conley, a former CISA official now running for Congress in New York, is especially concerned about the Trump administration undermining election integrity by misrepresenting cybersecurity incidents to call unfavorable results into question.
“Instead of the federal government being the adult in the room trying to explain … and reassure people and stand by the state and local election officials, I actually think it’s the federal government that’s going to be attacking them,” Conley said.
Trump and some of his top officials have also recently raised concerns about the security of the November elections with comments that raised eyebrows among elections officials.
The president has called for the federal government to “take over” elections around the country.
The president has called for the federal government to “take over” elections in as many as 15 places around the country, called mail-in voting “corrupt,” said there “will be” voter ID requirements “whether approved by Congress or not” and repeated false claims about the 2020 election, as the FBI seized voter data from a Georgia election office based on a warrant that cited debunked claims about it.
Kristi Noem, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, which includes CISA, recently caused a firestorm of criticism when she said her agency should play a role in election security.
“We’ve been proactive to make sure we have the right people voting, electing the right leaders to lead this country,” she said.
Conley said that those actions raise serious questions.
“Unfortunately, we have seen with this administration that nothing is off the table, and the conduct that we’ve seen just in the last several weeks, I think, gives great concern to what the motivations and true intentions of this administration are,” she told MS NOW.
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Julia Jester covers politics for MS NOW and is based in Washington, D.C.