This piece was first published in Slate.
In its crusade against federal agencies, the Trump administration is targeting our election system, making potentially dangerous reductions to protections that help keep elections free, fair, and secure. On Friday, the acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency sent a memo to all agency staff notifying them that “all election security activities” would be paused pending the results of an internal investigation. The memo also stated that the administration was cutting off all funds to the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center—a Department of Homeland Security–funded organization that helps state and local officials monitor, analyze, and respond to cyberattacks targeting the nation’s election hardware and software.
The work of CISA and the EI-ISAC has been central to election security in the United States for most of the past decade, providing state and local election officials with critical tools and assistance to defend against cyber and physical threats to election systems. These steps and other recent blows to federal election guardrails were foretold in Project 2025. Understanding the playbook will help us be ready to push back when the next shoes drop.
Changes to CISA began shortly after Kristi Noem was sworn in as secretary of Homeland Security, which oversees the agency. Beyond the announced election security pause and defunding of EI-ISAC, the agency also put critical election security staff on leave and targeted them for potential termination. These staff include CISA’s regional election security advisers, who are former state and local election officials that provide on-the-ground security support to current frontline election workers, and members of the agency’s Election Resilience team, who were reportedly targeted because they had previously been involved with the agency’s efforts to communicate accurate information about election security to election officials and the public.
Although state and local election officials from both sides of the aisle have praised CISA for providing such support, President Donald Trump and several other conservatives have criticized the agency ever since Trump’s first appointee to lead CISA, Christopher Krebs, promoted accurate information about the 2020 election, including that the election was secure. (The president continues to falsely claim that the 2020 election was rigged.)
According to reports, leaders at the Department of Homeland Security will decide next steps for CISA’s election security initiatives when its review is completed March 6. But given the president’s attacks on CISA’s work, it is not difficult to imagine that the administration will permanently gut the agency’s election security role, as recommended in Project 2025.
Even if CISA nominally continues to offer limited election security support, cutting its staff and deprioritizing its work may mean that the nearly 10,000 local election officials on the ground feel very little benefit from the group.
The new administration’s attacks on federal election security assistance extend beyond CISA or the EI-ISAC. Almost immediately after she was sworn in as attorney general, Pam Bondi disbanded the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force—another target of Project 2025. The task force was established during Trump’s first term, following Russian actors’ attempts to interfere in the 2016 election by hacking campaign emails, influencing public opinion through social media, and probing for cybersecurity weak points in voter registration systems. Interference from Russia and other countries continues to threaten American elections. In 2024 bomb threats that appeared to come from Russian email domains were sent to polling locations, videos tied to Russia falsely depicted election workers destroying ballots, and hackers tied to Iran successfully obtained and attempted to leak documents from the Trump campaign. Now a critical line of defense against these attacks is gone.
The Trump administration also took aim earlier this month at the Federal Election Commission, the bipartisan agency that regulates campaign finance in federal elections. Project 2025 called for a weaker FEC, arguing that the independent agency should do less to regulate political spending. In an unprecedented move, Trump tried to fire the commission’s chair. The move came just as the FEC is set to adjudicate campaign finance complaints from the 2024 election, many of which involved billionaire Elon Musk’s contributions to and spending on behalf of the Trump campaign.
Each of these maneuvers weakens the guardrails that have kept American elections secure and fair. And again, they may be just the beginning, given other election-related recommendations in Project 2025.
The plan also further advocates targeting public and private institutions like task forces and university researchers that study election lies and attempt to communicate accurate election information to the public. Project 2025 even suggests weaponizing civil rights laws to go after election officials, voting registration groups, and nonpartisan voter-friendly policies.
Fortunately, the pushback against at least some of these efforts already has a blueprint in the pushback against executive orders targeting other government functions. Dozens of lawsuits have already been filed in response to Trump’s executive orders. Public pressure campaigns also appear to have had some success, with leaders in the Trump administration reversing course on policy decisions like the federal funding freeze. Any efforts by the Trump administration to use the Department of Justice or the Federal Communications Commission—as was suggested by Project 2025—to prevent Americans from voting, or exercising their First Amendment rights to tell the truth about elections, can likewise be fought in courts of law and public opinion.
But even if such battles roll back some of the worst abuses, it is clear the federal government will, at best, play a much smaller role in protecting elections. That means state and local governments will need to stand up even more to secure our elections in 2026 and 2028. Lawmakers, governors, and other public leaders, together with civil society, must step into the space vacated by the federal government by providing support, resources, and protections to secure local election infrastructure and defend voters’ rights.
