Trump administration cuts teams that fight foreign election interference

The Trump administration this week eliminated much of the federal government’s front line of defense against foreign interference in U.S. elections.

The move, which follows years of Trump and his allies disputing the role that Russian influence campaigns played in his first successful bid for president, alarmed state election officials and election security experts, who warned that safeguarding Americans from foreign disinformation campaigns will be difficult if no one at the federal level is doing that work.

On Wednesday, Attorney General Pam Bondi dissolved an FBI task force formed in response to Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential elections that worked to uncover covert efforts by Russia, China, Iran and other foreign adversaries to manipulate U.S. voters.

Separately, the Department of Homeland Security sent a letter Wednesday placing at least seven federal employees who work on teams combating foreign disinformation within the election security arm of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, on administrative leave, according to a recipient who shared a copy of the letter with The Washington Post.

“This is an invitation for more foreign interference,” said Lawrence Norden, vice president of the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

Bondi announced the shuttering of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force in a policy memo outlining a shift in the Justice Department’s priorities. The directive said the team was being shut down “to free resources to address more pressing priorities, and end risks of further weaponization and abuses of prosecutorial discretion.”

The CISA employees were not given a reason for being put on leave, but Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem suggested at her Jan. 17 confirmation hearing that she wanted CISA to stop doing this work.

“CISA has gotten far off mission,” Noem said. “They’re using their resources in ways that was never intended. The misinformation and disinformation that they have stuck their toe into and meddled with should be refocused back onto what their job is.”

Neither the White House nor CISA responded to a request for comment.

Both the Justice Department and CISA teams have been the target of claims by conservatives that the government’s work to combat election disinformation is censorship in disguise. After the 2020 election, many conservatives who did not accept the election results said that their social media posts on the topic were taken down or suppressed. They pointed to social media companies that slowed the spread of information about Hunter Biden’s laptop ahead of the 2020 election. The House Judiciary Committee accused CISA of colluding with major social media platforms and other government-funded civic organizations “to conduct censorship by proxy and cover up CISA’s unconstitutional activities.” CISA pushed back, saying such claims “are patently false.”

Election officials at the state level got an early indication of CISA’s changing role when no one from the group briefed them at the National Association of Secretaries of State conference in D.C. last week.

But Democratic and Republican election officials who have worked with the group have defended its work. For example, CISA’s team helped local election officials and elected leaders throughout Arizona fight misinformation and disinformation before, during and after the 2024 election, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes (D) said.

“This makes American elections weaker unless the administration is planning on moving those operations and those people somewhere else and the services are still going to be provided,” he said. “But if that doesn’t happen, the American public is now more susceptible to the bad guys.”

CISA’s work on the misinformation front is “invaluable,” said Dana Lewis, a Republican recorder in a rural Republican-leaning county east of Phoenix. She said the team has provided her office with visual aids — like handouts — to help educate voters about finding trusted sources of information, and to help debunk false information.

Lewis said her staff has also worked with CISA to flag inaccurate online information about elections: “It’s a highway traffic of information,” she said. “If we’re seeing something happening here, we’re reporting it to them through our threat liaison officer and if they’re seeing something then they’re communicating that down the chain. … That’s how you stay on your toes.”

The elimination of the FBI’s foreign threats task force also “scares the heck out of me for the safety of our election systems and our voters,” Fontes said.

The decision to shutter the FBI’s foreign threats team is especially concerning because the Trump administration is firing so many other people from the bureau, a Democratic Senate aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations told The Washington Post. “It’s not clear they would be able to reproduce it in any meaningful way soon, even if they wanted to,” the aide said.

Even with the CISA and FBI teams in place, disinformation from foreign actors reached American voters in 2024, said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, a nonprofit that promotes trust in elections. But without them, he added, “it will be much harder to tell what is true, what is false, what is being fed to American voters for the purposes of defrauding them and getting them to unwittingly assist in our foreign adversaries efforts to divide us.”

Trump and his allies have often claimed that claims of foreign interference — especially those related to Russia’s efforts to sway the 2016 election — are overblown.

It will be nearly impossible for states and local governments to replicate the work the federal government was doing to counter disinformation, Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D) said. Even if some could be it could not be scaled to the level needed to confront the volume of threats, she added.

Instead, election security will vary by state based on resources and which ones prioritize this work, said Emerson Brooking, who does forensic research identifying foreign misinformation at the Atlantic Council.

“Some states should not have better election security than others. All Americans are entitled to the same understanding that their elections not being interfered with,” he said.

In Pierce County, Washington, which includes Tacoma, Linda Farmer, the county auditor who oversees elections for about 600,000 voters, said CISA’s team provided resources that smaller offices like hers can’t afford.

“To have that gone, at the moment, that’s unfathomable,” she said.