Political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security asked the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to secretly acquire a voting machine, hack it, and report the findings to the White House, according to two former administration officials with knowledge of the request.
The request was made a few months into President Donald Trump’s second term. The appointees wanted CISA to procure the machine, examine it, and provide the results to the White House, the officials said. One former official said the proposition was shocking to CISA’s career staffers, who feared they were being asked to take part in political interference.
“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 said. “This goes against everything CISA represents.”
The request also directed the agency not to alert the voting machine company if it uncovered flaws, contrary to standard practice. CISA employees repeatedly told the appointees the request was impossible, in part because the agents capable of such an operation had just been laid off by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative. The appointees eventually stopped pressing CISA.
The request was not acted on, the officials said.
Agency staffing and budget cuts
In Trump’s second term, the administration has laid off or pushed out more than 1,000 CISA employees, shrinking the agency by about one-third. The president’s 2027 budget proposal would reduce funding for the agency by another $700 million, which could necessitate 900 additional layoffs, according to the report.
Democratic lawmakers have called for an investigation into CISA’s ability to do its job and demanded answers as to why federal funds are not being used to support election security as directed by Congress.
Several state election authorities said the agency provided them no assistance during the most critical planning stages for the upcoming midterms.
“There is a difference between deprioritizing and being nonexistent,” said Ryan Macias, an election technology and cybersecurity expert who has worked as a consultant for CISA. In 2025 and through mid-September 2026 — when the bulk of preparations for the election typically would have been completed — “they were nonexistent. Literally nonexistent.”
Though CISA re-emerged in September with a last-minute security plan for the election, some state officials said they fear that what is left of the agency has been compromised. In recent months, the Trump administration has declassified troves of records, including sensitive material that state officials provided to CISA. Some state authorities said they no longer trusted the administration enough to share information with CISA.
“They’ve violated the entire premise of that information-sharing relationship,” said one former high-ranking federal cybersecurity official who now advises state governments on national security. “There’s no fucking way they’re ever going to give any information to CISA. And it’s unclear if they ever will in the future.”
A White House spokesperson, Lauren Bis, defended Trump’s handling of election security in an emailed statement: “President Trump has done more than any other President to ensure we have free and fair elections.” DHS and CISA did not respond to interview requests or to a detailed list of questions.
Officials in one large voting jurisdiction said they have met privately with machine vendors to come up with a contingency plan if the federal government seizes their machines or declares them unusable.
“I don’t pay attention to what the president says. I pay attention to what his administration does,” Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said. “And what they’ve done is basically cut us off and left us on our own.”
Sources: Defense One