Political appointees within the Trump administration’s Department of Homeland Security directed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to secretly acquire and hack a voting machine in the early months of President Trump’s second term, instructing the agency to withhold any discovered vulnerabilities from the machine’s manufacturer and report findings exclusively to the White House. The directive, reported by ProPublica on the basis of accounts from two former administration officials with direct knowledge of the request, represents a fundamental inversion of CISA’s founding mandate: to protect election infrastructure from precisely the kind of covert exploitation the agency was being asked to conduct.
Standard CISA protocol requires the agency to notify manufacturers of any vulnerabilities identified in their technology through a process known as coordinated disclosure, a practice central to the agency’s credibility as a neutral protector of critical infrastructure. The political appointees who issued the directive explicitly overrode that requirement. One former official described the potential use of concealed vulnerabilities in stark terms: “My thought was they could keep it in their back pocket to invalidate any election results they don’t like. This goes against everything CISA represents.” The second source corroborated the account without disputing its core details, and neither the White House nor DHS offered a substantive denial of the underlying facts.
The request ultimately went unfulfilled. Remaining CISA staff told the political appointees that the agency lacked the personnel capacity to carry out the operation, a direct consequence of the sweeping job cuts that have hollowed out the agency since January 2025. Approximately 1,000 positions have been eliminated, roughly one third of the agency’s total workforce, with reductions attributed largely to the Department of Government Efficiency led by Elon Musk. Further funding cuts projected for 2027 are expected to eliminate an additional 900 positions. Most of the agency’s senior leadership has either resigned or been dismissed.
Since 2018, CISA has carried statutory responsibility for defending election infrastructure against cyberattacks and foreign interference. That role has been progressively dismantled. State election officials, who historically relied on CISA for threat intelligence and technical assistance ahead of major votes, say they have been effectively cut off. A former high-ranking federal cybersecurity official told ProPublica: “They’ve violated the entire premise of that information-sharing relationship. 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.” Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes was equally direct: “I don’t pay attention to what the president says. I pay attention to what his administration does. And what they’ve done is basically cut us off and left us on our own.” The White House’s response, delivered by spokeswoman Lauren Bis, was that “President Trump has done more than any other President to ensure we have free and fair elections,” without addressing the specific allegations.
The revelations surface as early voting for the 2026 midterm elections has already begun in several states, and access to polling infrastructure is already proving contested. In North Carolina, early voting sites at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, the University of North Carolina Greensboro, and Western Carolina University have been shuttered, with Guilford County board members citing resource allocation as justification. The closures affect a combined student population of roughly 40,000. University policy at some of these institutions restricts first-year students from keeping cars on campus, meaning that reaching the nearest available polling location, more than 45 minutes away on foot, now requires arranging paid transportation at a moment of elevated fuel costs. Shia Rozier, a senior at North Carolina A&T and co-founder of the student organisation Protect Ours NC, told NPR that students “have to get a Lyft or get an Uber or get somebody to take them at a time where gas prices are extremely high, creating an additional barrier to the poll.” Students responded by organising a collective march to the nearest open site, a practical act of civic resistance against what voting rights advocates describe as a structural narrowing of the franchise.