The Trump administration has abandoned key security bodies meant to investigate direct threats to US elections by foreign actors and domestic terrorists, according to former officials and a recent report.
While administration officials have been actively focused on unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud by noncitizens, other credible election threats appear to have been overlooked, the officials say.
Taskforce prosecutions and quiet period
Between 2021 and 2024, the justice department’s election threats taskforce prosecuted 21 cases, like that of Solomon Peña, a failed candidate for the New Mexico house of representatives who organized shootings at the houses of election officials, or Quintez Brown, who shot up a campaign meeting of Louisville’s mayor.
Democrats and Republicans faced prosecution for harassing, intimidating and threatening elections workers, noted Nikki Fisher, former chief election security officer for the Oregon secretary of state, now the executive director of the Oregon District Attorneys Association.
Since then, the taskforce seems to have gone quiet.
“While officials are being trained to handle threats, the federal deterrent meant to punish the people making them appears to have gone quiet,” Fisher said. “To date, no new cases have been prosecuted, and the DoJ’s election threats taskforce appears to be defunct in practice.”
Contacted for comment on the status of the election threats taskforce, the justice department referred to a series of nine DoJ media releases over the past five weeks describing indictments of foreign nationals on charges of election fraud and stolen identities.
Disbanding of election investigative groups
In an academic paper published in June, while she was studying at the Naval Postgraduate School, Fisher noted that the taskforce received more than 2,000 reports of election threats between 2021 and 2024. It opened more than 100 investigations into those threats.
Trump administration officials began disbanding election investigative groups within the justice department, the office of the director of national intelligence, and other agencies almost immediately after the president started his second term.
The first day after Pam Bondi won Senate confirmation as attorney general, she eliminated the FBI’s foreign influence taskforce, which had been investigating influence campaigns waged by China, Russia and other adversaries.
Administration leaders fired or reassigned personnel working on foreign election interference at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa). They also defunded Cisa’s training program for local officials to monitor and coordinate threats through the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center.
Pleas from Democratic lawmakers during budget negotiations in 2025 to retain the task force and other election integrity assets went unheeded.
Impact on local agencies
“I’m less worried about jurisdictions’ ability to defend themselves in particular,” said Geoff Hale, a visiting fellow for election security at the Center for Democracy & Technology and former director at Cisa. “I’m more worried about the lack of an information-sharing environment across the community.”
Federal cuts to these agencies’ monitoring and investigative apparatus leaves local agencies blind to broader patterns, he said. “The relationships and trust that Cisa had built up over 10 years, that was how the tapestry of security professionals that support elections across the country stayed in close contact and were able to close vulnerabilities to keep events and incidents from occurring in multiple locations.”
Agencies working together with state and local election leaders offered regular warnings about suspicious activity, said Caitlin Durkovich, a former deputy homeland security adviser for resilience and response on the national security council, said at a briefing staged by the Brennan Center for Justice last week.
“This administration … has dismantled the entire apparatus that is responsible for detecting and holding these bad actors accountable,” she said. “That has all gone away at a moment when this administration is again claiming that the spectre of foreign operations is … in play.”
Focus on unverified claims
Meanwhile, Trump officials have been focused on some of the president’s longstanding personal grievances when it comes to election integrity.
FBI agents swooped into Fulton county in January to seize ballots from the 2020 election, ostensibly as part of a continuing investigation into foreign election interference. Tulsi Gabbard, then the director of national intelligence, was present at the FBI raid. Similarly, the ODNI and the FBI seized elections apparatus in Puerto Rico, again while investigating foreign interference.
Nothing has yet come of either event.
But both cases led up to a primetime address by Trump on 16 July, where he claimed China had acquired extensive voter information during the 2020 election cycle, characterizing it as an effort to influence and undermine legitimacy in the 2018 midterm and 2020 presidential elections.
Trump argued that US election databases and hardware had vulnerabilities to foreign adversaries, and that Venezuela had digitally manipulated its election results in ways that might be replicated in an American election.
Trump’s claims could not be substantiated from the evidence presented.
Since that address – and the public’s tepid response to the claims – the administration has pivoted to a dogged pursuit of noncitizen voters in American elections.
The DoJ has charged more than 90 people with voter-related fraud offenses, 50 noncitizens in the last five weeks, attorney general Todd Blanche said on Wednesday, contrasting it with 13 cases brought under the Biden administration.
“What we do at Department of Homeland Security is not controversial; we’re enforcing our nation’s laws,” said homeland security secretary Markwayne Mullin, who was also at the event. “Underneath the Trump administration, we will always protect the integrity of our election system and enforce our nation’s laws.”
