State and local election officials who have grown to rely on the federal government’s cybersecurity assistance fear that the Trump administration may permanently block that aid by Thursday.
Such funding, which began in President Donald Trump’s first term and is funnelled through the country’s top domestic security body, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), stopped in February. Those programs include free on-site and remote security testing of election machines and the websites that report election results, and ad hoc “situation rooms” where election officials can virtually gather and discuss security tactics in real time.
“Taking away that funding would be a very, very bad idea,” said Howie Knapp, the executive director of South Carolina’s State Election Commission,” told NBC News.
“We all know as taxpayers there is government bloat enough, but this is protecting the core function of democracy,” Knapp said. “If there’s government cuts to be made, I would recommend they don’t start with securing our nation’s elections.”
CISA, which is under the Department of Homeland Security, plans to make a decision on the future of federal election security assistance by Thursday, according to a Feb. 14 agency memo obtained by NBC News. The memo was first reported by Wired.
In an emailed statement, a DHS spokesperson confirmed CISA has “strategically paused all elections security activities.”
The potential cuts come amid a government-wide reduction in federal staffing and programming in Trump’s first weeks back in office. At CISA alone, more than 140 employees have been laid off since Trump took office, a DHS spokesperson told NBC News.
Most of the free election cybersecurity services that the federal government provides to states are funded by CISA but conducted through an organization called the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing & Analysis Center (EI-ISAC), which is run by the nonprofit Center for Internet Security. In a separate Feb. 14 letter to CISA obtained by NBC News (separate from the agency memo of the same day), the Department of Homeland Security ordered the Center for Internet Security to “terminate” those election services….