The federal government has halted election security activities and ended funding for the system that alerts state officials of election security threats across state lines, a representative of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency told state election officials last week.
The March 3 email, obtained exclusively by Votebeat, confirmed for secretaries of state and state election directors what they had read in news reports and noticed happening in practice: that President Donald Trump’s administration has suspended or dismantled federal support for election security, at least for now.
The administration stopped funding the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, or EI-ISAC, which alerts state officials of active election threats in other states, because it “no longer supports Department priorities,” CISA’s acting chief external affairs officer, Erin Buechel Wieczorek, wrote in the email. CISA is part of the Department of Homeland Security.
CISA has also taken “appropriate actions” against employees who under the Biden administration had helped states monitor false information about elections posted on social media, Wieczorek wrote, adding that those actions were “ongoing.”
The message went to leaders at the National Association of State Election Directors and the National Association of Secretaries of State.
A spokesperson for CISA declined to comment further, or to confirm the number of employees fired. In initial cuts, in line with the administration’s goal of reducing the size of the federal government, about 130 CISA employees were terminated, according to press reports.