Trump Appointees Asked a Federal Agency to Acquire a Voting Machine and Hack It

Senior political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security asked CISA to secretly obtain a voting machine, probe it for flaws and report findings to the White House without notifying the vendor - a request that alarmed career staff who feared it amounted to political interference. CISA employees resisted and the plan was not carried out, in part because agents with the skills to execute such an operation had recently been laid off under a Department reorganization pushed by the administration. The episode illustrates a broader pattern: efforts to use and politicize CISA coincided with mass departures that shrank the agency by roughly one-third and left it ill-equipped to perform core election-security functions.

The broader consequence is a severe erosion of federal-state trust and capacity. Since the 2018 law that elevated election infrastructure as critical, CISA built confidential information-sharing and conducted penetration tests with states and vendors; recent declassifications and rhetoric reviving debunked 2020 theories have driven many states to withhold data and seek private workarounds such as paid sensors. CISA briefly issued a last-minute midterm plan, but officials and lawmakers warn proposed budget cuts and additional layoffs would further hollow out intelligence on foreign threats and other services states cannot replicate, prompting calls for oversight and jeopardizing coordinated defenses ahead of major elections.