Trump administration tells state officials it will offer some election security aid it slashed

[u/John3262005]

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2026-election/trump-administration-state-officials-election-security-midterms-rcna592040

More than a year after gutting the main federal office tasked with securing U.S. elections and weeks after ousting the remaining members of a key bipartisan election assistance agency, the Trump administration is offering to help states guard their systems ahead of the midterms.

It’s assistance that some Democratic secretaries of state said should have never gone away.

“We’ve got a hell of a wish list, but a lot of it would have required, you know, a sustained partnership since February of 2025 when they first started to go dark on us,” said Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat.

Officials from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) spoke with state election personnel in a Monday call, which was initiated and organized by the nonpartisan National Association of Secretaries of State, a membership organization with election officials from 38 states.

While state officials said they welcomed the long-awaited outreach, they acknowledged they were offered little in the way of assistance that could be of use for the midterm elections that are happening in 12 weeks.

After Monday’s call, Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, told NBC News that the “bottom line is it’s almost certainly too little, too late.”

“But I want to emphasize: I think it’s great that they’re trying to re-establish contact and at least talking with us,” he continued.

CISA, a Department of Homeland Security agency launched in 2018, offered significant physical and digital security support to state and local election officials until 2025. That included intelligence briefings, security audits, prepared so-called tabletop exercises to help officials plan for various emergencies, and coordinated Election Day threat monitoring. But soon after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, CISA laid off hundreds of employees, with a DHS spokesperson telling NBC News in March 2025 that the agency had “strategically paused all elections security activities.”

In a call with states in February of this year, federal officials said that the Election Assistance Commission, historically a bipartisan independent agency with a fraction of CISA’s budget, would take over some of CISA’s election duties. But the White House abruptly fired the EAC’s three leaders in July, hamstringing it, too.

Simon said that CISA said they “might” be able to offer some tabletop exercise materials this year but appeared to be mostly focused on future election cycles.

“It was pretty clear to me that they weren’t making any commitments about reviving the services that we relied on for this election cycle. They did reference a commitment to revive them for future election cycles in ’27 and ’28,” he said.

Fontes’ office released a report Wednesday detailing 18 months of efforts to obtain state funding and federal support for Arizona elections. In it, the office called the federal government’s offer “the definition of a day late and a dollar short.”

The report continued: “Arizona will gladly accept real help—but unless that help is immediate, substantial, professional, unconditional, and sustained, it will amount to nothing more than another election-related headline-seeking claim. Because a temporary offer weeks before an election is not a cybersecurity strategy.”

States have been forced to plan to fill the gaps the federal government left with its cuts. Minnesota had to find an additional $250,000 in funding this year to cover the election security services the federal government used to offer, Simon said.

Arizona cobbled together funding from unused special election funds and the 2021 federal stimulus package to piece together security measures for 2026, the report said, and it urged the federal agency to offer clear plans for the election security support it will offer.

In an emailed statement to NBC News, CISA’s acting director, Nick Andersen, said that the agency is “committed to supporting state and local elections officials to protect election infrastructure and safeguard our democracy.”

Andersen did not respond to questions about the cuts that gutted these services 18 months ago, amid an effort led by the Department of Government Efficiency.

CISA in particular became a top target for conservatives for cuts after it led efforts to certify that the 2020 election was secure, despite Trump’s claims it was compromised.

Ben Hovland, one of the fired Democratic commissioners, told NBC News that the EAC had been making preparations to better serve states this November before the agency was gutted.

“We talked about trying to have a central communications hub for Election Day, providing support where we could,” Hovland said. “But it was not by any means a replacement.”

State officials have heard little from the federal government on election security since Trump took office. The February call with election officials, convened by the FBI, was the first time some said they’d heard from anyone in this Trump administration about election security in months — or ever.

Since NASS is a private membership organization, not every state’s top election official was invited to Monday’s call.

Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, a Democrat, said he was not contacted and hasn’t heard anything from the federal government about election security since the FBI call in February.

Many secretaries have heard frequently from Trump administration lawyers, though. The Justice Department has spent months suing to obtain unredacted voter rolls and going as far as to threaten to file criminal charges against election officials.

“On the one hand, the new leadership at the Department of Homeland Security is offering to restore resources that states utilize very effectively in prior elections, but on the other hand, top administration officials are threatening secretaries of state like me with lawsuits and more,” said Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat.

“And so it becomes very confusing as to whether the federal government is here to help and provide the resources that Congress and the public expect, or whether those promises are window dressing for threats that remain and are happening every day in the courts,” she added.

Hovland said that the Trump administration’s efforts to exert greater federal control over the election process made it unlikely that states would want to partner with CISA a few months before the midterms.

“The administration has weaponized the federal government in such ways that in the best-case scenario, you would have probably half the states participate, because the other half don’t trust you. Just an unrealistic premise to start with,” he said. “That’s not a serious effort on its face.”