Trump officials asked CISA to covertly buy and hack a voting machine

According to two former officials, political appointees in the Department of Homeland Security asked the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to covertly acquire a voting machine, test it for weaknesses and forward the results to the White House, explicitly forbidding any notification to the vendor. CISA career employees found the order contradictory to their core role of defending election infrastructure and highlighted that the specialized team required for such an operation had been eliminated by a recent government-efficiency layoff.

The request was ultimately abandoned, yet it underscores a broader pattern of the Trump administration diverting CISA’s resources, cutting more than 1,000 staff and proposing a $700 million budget cut that could force another 900 layoffs. Democratic lawmakers have called for a probe into the agency’s capacity to protect elections, while state officials report that CISA has been largely absent from critical midterm preparations. The episode raises concerns about political interference in election security and the erosion of trust between federal and state election partners.