President Donald Trump’s administration scrapped the federal system that protects U.S. elections when he entered the White House last year. Now, less than 100 days before the election, they want to rebuild it. Election officials are making it clear that he’s simply too late. All that’s left to protect elections is “duct tape,” one official said, according to a CNN report.
CNN’s cybersecurity reporter Sean Lyngaas, on Friday, called it “ironic” since the first Trump administration “built a large federal apparatus for supporting election officials.”
In a prime-time address on July 16, Trump said that the 2020 election he oversaw was broken and that China somehow meddled with it.
“We’re talking about cybersecurity support, physical security assessments of facilities, intelligence sharing from the intelligence community on the latest threats. And then when Trump returned to office, he was still mad at the [Homeland Security] cyber agency for saying the 2020 election was secure. And so he fired most of the election security experts in that agency,” explained Lyngaas.
Trump now intends to rebuild the entire cyber agency “starting from scratch. And they make the point that they want to rebuild trust with election officials, trust that has been severely damaged by their actions in the last year.”
Geoff Hale, former election security official for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said, “We are well into the election cycle. It is not simply about Election Day. Election Day is not when the Russians started in 2016. It is not when the Iranians started in 2020 … People should be realizing we have a gap of information of 14 to 18 months.”
The CISA offices have been largely quiet after Trump first fired the director in Feb. 2025, and then in Oct. 2025, there were 176 DHS employees let go, many employees working for the (CISA), The Hill reported.
“So, this whole federal bureaucracy has been dormant,” Lyngaas continued. “Not really connecting with election officials. And now they’re scrambling to do so with less than 100 days to go to the midterm elections.”
There are still some staff at CISA, a press release this week showed. The agency reported that there has been “a significant increase in cyber threats” targeting what are called programmable logic controllers (PLCs), which are used in the Water and Wastewater Systems (WWS) across the U.S.