Federal drawdown of election support ‘destroyed’ ongoing relationships, experts say

Efforts under President Donald Trump to scale back the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and its election security resources have strained relationships with state and local officials, raising concerns that jurisdictions may be far less prepared to counter threats to the November midterms, officials in Michigan and Georgia said Tuesday.

The warnings, delivered by state officials and other experts at a hearing hosted by Democrats on the House Homeland Security Committee, come as the Trump administration has sought to expand the federal role in election administration through executive orders and the growing involvement of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard in election-related matters, including an FBI raid on a Fulton County, Georgia elections office.

The drawdown of CISA election resources over the last year has “been very damaging,” said Aghogho Edevbie, Michigan’s deputy secretary of state. 

“We had CISA employees and officials work alongside us,” he added, describing that CISA representatives would deploy to places where voting occurred and votes were being counted to conduct security assessments. “All of those relationships have been destroyed. We’ve had instances where our local election officials have been corresponding with members of CISA, and then, all of a sudden, there’s no response, because presumably that person has been fired.”

Earlier this month, the Justice Department demanded that Michigan’s Wayne County turn over all ballots from the November 2024 election. Edevbie, in the hearing, called the inquiry “unlawful,” aligning with other state officials.

Last year, CISA put much of its election disinformation staff on leave. The White House’s fiscal year 2027 budget proposal eliminates CISA’s election security program entirely, and would cut funding for information-sharing support to state and local officials and remove dedicated election security advisors across the nation. 

Election cybersecurity threats can include ransomware attacks, phishing campaigns and efforts by foreign adversaries to probe election systems and conduct influence operations.

Larry Norden, the VP of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Elections and Government program, noted that, in a recent survey, 75% of observed state and local election officials said their governments had not provided sufficient resources to fill the gap that was created by CISA cuts.

“And perhaps most damaging of all, many election officials that we talked to no longer trust the federal partners that they used to rely on to help them coordinate around election security,” Norden said.

Mo Ivory, former county commissioner for Fulton County who is now running for commission chair, criticized the FBI raid that Gabbard attended.

It “raised immediate questions about chain of custody, voter privacy, access to public records, preservation of official materials and whether Fulton County could continue meeting its legal obligations while federal authorities had taken possession of our documents,” she said.

“It also sent a message to the public servants who administer elections: even after doing your job, even after following the law, even after audits and reviews, you can still be pulled back into a political fight over an election that ended six years ago,” she added.

In 2020, Trump lost in Georgia by roughly 11,000 votes, prompting him and supporters to press state officials to uncover supposed missing votes to change the outcome. A later hand-count of the ballots upheld the original results.

Nextgov/FCW has asked CISA for comment.

The tensions between the Trump administration and CISA date back to the 2020 election, when its then-director Chris Krebs publicly affirmed the security of the vote and was subsequently dismissed by Trump. In his second term, Trump has continued to target Krebs, including ordering a federal investigation last year into his government tenure.

Jessica Marsden, a deputy director and counsel at Protect Democracy, said such efforts are meant to erode sources of high quality information and that attacks on critics of the administration “look like an effort to silence those who will tell the truth.”

On Tuesday, Gen. Josh Rudd, the director of U.S. Cyber Command and the NSA, told senators it is “reasonable to expect” foreign adversaries would seek to interfere in the upcoming midterm elections. Rudd said he was unsure whether the Election Security Group, a joint task force central to countering foreign election sabotage since 2018, has been reconvened.

“I don’t know that an ESG has been established yet, but we are prepared to as required,” he said. “I think it is really important to set up an ESG and I will follow up with you on whether that is happening.”