Top state election officials are warning the federal government is not doing enough to help states prepare for the possibility of cyberattacks ahead of the midterm elections.
President Donald Trump has had an unflinching focus on election integrity issues, which he has pushed Congress to address through legislation that would tighten voter-identification requirements.
In the meantime, several state officials told NOTUS that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which supports state and local election offices in their efforts to bolster security against hackers, has stopped providing regular intelligence briefings as well as cut technical assistance and financial support for election administration to their states.
“The federal government knows that there are nation-state actors desperately trying to come after us and cause chaos in our elections, yet, they are reducing resources,” Steve Hobbs, Washington’s Democratic secretary of state, told NOTUS. “We’re doing everything we can to try to protect ourselves with far less resources than we did before.”
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Republican state election officials confirmed that the cuts have also changed their states’ cybersecurity operations.
“If you go back to 2020, we had 30 different federal threat briefings. This year we received none,” Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, told NOTUS. “We benefited from that regular coordination with CISA. It was just another set of eyes with extended reach over the horizon and that many times our state agencies just don’t have that available to them.”
“We know that there’s a lot of threats currently between the Ukraine war and Russia not being pleased with our response there,” Raffensperger said. “The ongoing situation with Iranians, and then obviously AI has opened the door to a host of bad actors.”
The administration has aggressively reduced election-security personnel within CISA since Trump returned to office. Earlier this year, Congress cut hundreds of millions of dollars from CISA’s budget. The White House has proposed even deeper cuts to the agency’s budget.
The results of that are playing out as states prepare for the midterms. Three state election officials told NOTUS that CISA has stopped providing election-focused cybersecurity support and does not have the same capacity to operate as a central hub for state officials to communicate with federal agencies and to other states during cyberattacks.
Attempted cybersecurity attacks happen frequently, including during the 2024 election.
“The federal government has abandoned a large share of its previous commitment to helping states administer secure elections,” Steve Simon, Minnesota’s secretary of state, said. “There are a host of services that they previously provided under multiple administrations — including the first Trump administration — that are no longer available to us.”
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, did not respond to questions about the decrease in federal cybersecurity support for elections. Instead, her statement focused on the Trump administration’s efforts to clamp down on noncitizen voting.
“President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters,” she wrote.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told NOTUS in a statement that under President Joe Biden, CISA had a “ballooning budget” that concealed “censorship, branding, and electioneering.”
“Under Secretary Mullin, CISA is focused squarely on executing its statutory mission,” this spokesperson wrote. “We are committed to delivering timely, actionable cyber threat intelligence, supporting federal, state, and local partners, and defending against both nation-state and criminal cyber threats.”
Many states have been forced to create and fund their own resources to replace federal services. For example, Simon told NOTUS that Minnesota substituted cybersecurity testing and tabletop exercises provided by the federal government with ones provided by private sector partners.
Still, there are some functions the federal government provided that states can’t compensate for.
“States, including very much Minnesota, have found ways to backfill and replace almost all of those services,” Simon said. “One area that is very difficult to replace is intelligence briefings. That is not something that we can just go to a store and buy.”
Geoff Hale, a former CISA election security official who worked at the agency during the Trump and Biden administrations, said that CISA is retreating from election security at a time when elections are at greater risk of being targeted by foreign adversaries like Russia, China and Iran.
“Iran has been so aggressive towards elections and election infrastructure over several election cycles,” Hale, who was laid off from CISA last year and is now a visiting fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told NOTUS. “If they were willing to take those actions during better times when the relationship was not an ongoing war, I’m very fearful of what they’d be willing to attempt amid ongoing conflict.”
States also now have to fund a service that shares cybersecurity information across state lines, something the federal government used to pay for. Last year, the Trump administration ended funding for the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center, which is part of a nonprofit that helps the federal government share cybersecurity information with local election officials. While the organization continues to operate, it has faced staffing cuts which have limited its capabilities.
Officials from Georgia, Minnesota, Washington and New Mexico told NOTUS they’ve had to pay MS-ISAC fees this year.
“If something occurs in New Jersey, can Virginia benefit from understanding and blocking those suspicious indicators? Can Colorado and Texas benefit from information that occurred on systems in Ohio?” Hale asked. “It may not stop everything, but it stops an attack from getting much bigger.”
Several secretaries of state made a point of emphasizing to NOTUS they’re confident that their states have built up their own cybersecurity operations sufficiently to protect against cyberattacks this election cycle.
“We feel like we’ve been working on our capabilities over many years, and our voters can remain confident that Georgia is prepared to conduct secure, accurate and reliable elections,” Raffensperger said.
One official from a Republican-led state told NOTUS he’s not concerned about the lack of federal support ahead of the midterms.
“Our phone is always open to any calls from the Department of Homeland Security,” Denny Hoskins, Missouri’s secretary of state, told NOTUS. “I have the utmost confidence in President Trump and his administration that they can help sniff out these bad actors and handle any malicious attacks that occur across the U.S.”
Still, he acknowledged this is a high-threat environment for election infrastructure.
“We have cyberattacks on our election files as well as our business services files every day. I mean, every day we have bad actors that are trying to hack into those files,” Hoskins said.
CISA funding has been a point of contention in Congress for years. Trump and many congressional Republicans have argued that CISA’s efforts to track election misinformation amounted to federal overreach and a violation of the First Amendment. The Trump administration has framed cutting CISA funding as a way to focus on other areas of infrastructure cybersecurity.
“It is necessary to rescope the agency’s election security activities to ensure CISA is focused exclusively on executing its cyber and physical security mission,” Bridget Bean, CISA’s acting director, told employees in a memo reported by Wired in February.
In May, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Virginia) wrote a letter to Kristi Noem, the DHS secretary at the time, to share his concerns about pulling back federal election support.
“I am gravely concerned about the lack of critical federal support to state and localities ahead of the 2026 midterms,” Warner wrote. “It is vital that CISA be permitted to respond to election threats, vulnerabilities, and foreign interference or influence.”
For some state election officials, however, the lack of federal support does not mean election security has reverted to where it was in 2016, when Russia was accused of interfering in the election to help Trump win the presidency.
“We’re not back in 2016. We all learned the lesson of 2016, which is we have to double down and triple down on election security of all kinds. States have been doing that,” Simon said. “I would say that the federal government mindset has gone back in the time machine. But in terms of readiness, we are not in 2016. We are far more advanced than that.”
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