CISA Puts Election Staff on Administrative Leave

Employees tasked with helping to secure elections from foreign threats and disinformation within the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have been placed on administrative leave. The move puts the security and integrity of elections in the U.S. — especially at the state level, where local election officials rely on CISA resources to securely run elections — at risk.

According to multiple reports, at least 17 employees of CISA, which is housed within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, were recently put on leave. The employees, according to the Associated Press, worked specifically within CISA’s election efforts, helping state and local election officials secure their elections from cyber attacks and handle foreign and domestic-based disinformation and influence campaigns.

It’s no surprise that President Donald Trump’s administration is making drastic cuts to CISA. One of the many proposals in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is a call to completely gut the nation’s cybersecurity agency. “The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is a DHS component that the Left has weaponized to censor speech and affect elections at the expense of securing the cyber domain and critical infrastructure, which are threatened daily,” writes Ken Cucinelli, Trump’s former deputy secretary of Homeland Security, in the DHS chapter of Project 2025. “A conservative Administration should return CISA to its statutory and important but narrow mission.”

During DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s confirmation hearing, she criticized the agency, saying that “CISA needs to be much more effective, smaller, more nimble, to really fulfill their mission.” 

Though CISA is a relatively new agency — formed in 2018 during the first Trump administration — it quickly became a crucial resource for the nation’s cybersecurity. And it became even more integral to election security. “There was really no federal agency before CISA that was providing any sort of comprehensive election security support to state and local election officials,” Derek Tisler, a counsel in the Brennan Center’s Elections and Government Program, explained to Democracy Docket. “And it obviously has become more important as the election security threat environment has changed so much — especially since 2016, when we really started to see the potential for interference in our elections.”

CISA’s election security efforts earned bipartisan praise, even after Trump went after the agency’s first director, Christopher Krebs, in the aftermath of the 2020 election. It’s unclear what happens next for CISA, and its elections operations, but Tisler previously told Democracy Docket that he would anticipate pushback if it eliminates its election resources. “Especially among state and local election officials from both parties who understand the value of this agency, understand how much the agency support has put them in a better position to run secure elections,” he said.