This Cybersecurity Agency Is Supposed to Protect U.S. Elections. Officials Fear It’s Been Compromised by Trump.

In the first few months of Donald Trump’s second term, officials at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) approached the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) with a peculiar request. They asked CISA to secretly acquire a voting machine and then hack it. The goal was to have the findings reported back to the White House so they could be used against any election results the administration did not like.

This was an unsettling proposition for CISA’s career employees, who were accustomed to thwarting hackers rather than participating in political interference. Some employees worried that the agency was being asked to undermine the very election security it was supposed to protect. CISA typically operated under the policy of not informing voting machine companies of any flaws it discovered, contrary to its standard practices.

The proposal made CISA employees fear they were being asked to take part in political interference. The employees repeatedly rejected the request, citing the shortage of agents capable of carrying out such an operation due to previous layoffs by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative. Despite the rejection, the request highlights how the Trump administration attempted to use CISA for its own ends while simultaneously draining the agency of resources for one of its most critical missions: safeguarding the nation’s voting systems.