A few months into Trump's second term, political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security asked the nation's election cybersecurity agency to secretly buy a voting machine, hack it, and not tell the manufacturer what it found. The career staffers who got the request were so alarmed they feared they were being recruited into political interference. The plan died for a gloriously stupid reason: the people who could have done it had just been laid off.
The Request Nobody at CISA Could Believe
According to a ProPublica investigation, two former administration officials with knowledge of the request say DHS political appointees wanted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to procure a voting machine, examine it, and report the findings so they could be handed to the White House. That is the whole ask. Buy one. Break it. Send us the results.
Here's the part that made career staff's stomachs drop. CISA was told not to alert the voting machine company if it found flaws. That runs directly against the agency's standard practice, which is to find a vulnerability and tell the vendor so it gets fixed. The job is to thwart hackers, not to stockpile their tools.
So the agency built to protect elections was being asked to find the cracks in the system and keep quiet about them. If you wanted to design a request that looked like prep work for contesting an election result, you'd struggle to improve on this one.
"In Their Back Pocket"
One of the former officials didn't hedge about how it landed. "My thought was they could keep it in their back pocket to invalidate any [election] results they don't like," the official said. "This goes against everything CISA represents."
To be fair, that's one official's read of the intent, and the request was never acted on. We don't know what the appointees planned to do with the findings. We do know what they told the agency to do, and what they told it not to do. Draw your own conclusions. Most people with a functioning sense of cause and effect already have.
The staffers repeatedly told the appointees the request was impossible. The appointees eventually stopped pressing. No machine was bought. No machine was hacked. But somebody in a political office at DHS thought this was a normal thing to ask for.
Impossible Because Elon Fired the Hackers
Now for the punchline, and it's a good one. CISA told the appointees the operation couldn't be done, in part because the agents capable of pulling it off had just been laid off by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency.
Read that again. One arm of the administration wanted a covert hacking job. Another arm had already fired the hackers. This is the federal government as a Coen brothers heist, if the crew was fired by the guy who planned the heist and nobody told the guy who planned the heist.
It would be funny if it weren't the agency responsible for keeping foreign adversaries out of American voting infrastructure.
A Third of the Agency, Gone
The request is a symptom. The disease is the gutting. Trump's second-term administration has laid off or pushed out more than 1,000 CISA employees, shrinking the agency by about one-third. His 2027 budget proposal would cut another $700 million, which could force 900 more layoffs.
Democratic lawmakers have called for an investigation into CISA's ability to do its job and demanded to know why federal funds aren't being used to support election security as Congress directed. Good questions. Don't hold your breath.
Keep the irony in view. Trump signed the CISA Act in 2018, creating the agency in its current form. Since then CISA has worked with state authorities and voting machine vendors to protect election infrastructure. In his second term, the agency has abandoned much of that work.
"Literally Nonexistent" During Midterm Prep
Ryan Macias, an election technology and cybersecurity expert who has consulted for CISA, put it bluntly. "There is a difference between deprioritizing and being nonexistent," he said. In 2025 and through mid-September 2026, when the bulk of election preparations would normally be done, "they were nonexistent. Literally nonexistent."
Several state election authorities said CISA gave them no assistance, and no explanation for its absence, during the most critical planning stages for the midterms. CISA re-emerged in September with a last-minute security plan. A last-minute plan, in October, for a November election.
States have been paying for their own fixes, including sensor technology that detects unusual activity in election networks. But some things can't be replicated by a state IT department, like intelligence on foreign actors. That's the kind of thing you need a federal agency for, assuming one is still home.
Burning the Trust That Made It Work
Here's the damage that may outlast any budget fight. CISA's success depended on states voluntarily sharing sensitive information with it. Then the Trump administration, while reviving debunked theories about the 2020 election, declassified troves of records, including sensitive material that state officials had given to CISA.
Some state authorities now say they don't trust the administration enough to share information with the agency. One former high-ranking federal cybersecurity official who now advises state governments said the administration had "violated the entire premise of that information-sharing relationship." The official's prediction for the future was profane and pessimistic.
Officials in one large voting jurisdiction have met privately with machine vendors to build a contingency plan in case the federal government seizes their machines or declares them unusable. Think about that. Local election administrators are war-gaming against Washington. The White House, for its part, offered a statement from spokesperson Lauren Bis: "President Trump has done more than any other President to ensure we have free and fair elections." DHS and CISA did not respond to ProPublica's questions.
The Dingo Take
One thousand employees. One third of the agency. Another 900 layoffs on the table. That is the Trump administration's record at the one federal agency whose job is keeping hackers out of American elections, and it comes packaged with a request to secretly hack a voting machine and hide the flaws from the manufacturer.
Look, the request never went anywhere, and we can't say what the appointees planned to do with the results. But you don't need a confession to read the pattern. Trump keeps telling the country that voting is vulnerable, sometimes with claims that have been disproven. His administration keeps dismantling the people whose job is to make it less vulnerable. And now we learn his political appointees wanted a private stash of exploits and an agency told to stay quiet about them. If you were building the case for "the machines can't be trusted" after the fact, this is exactly the kind of material you'd want sitting in a drawer.
The midterms are weeks away. State officials are buying their own sensors, quietly planning for a federal seizure of their equipment, and withholding information from the agency that's supposed to help them. That is what a functioning democracy looks like when its own government has become the threat model. Somebody should ask the White House why the people who say elections are so easy to hack keep firing everyone who knows how to stop it.
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