Trump Officials Asked Election Security Agency to Secretly Obtain and Hack a Voting Machine, Report Finds

Political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security asked the federal agency responsible for defending elections to secretly buy a voting machine and hack it, then hand the findings to the White House, ProPublica revealed.

The request was made a few months into Donald Trump's second term and directed at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, the body created to protect voting systems from attack. The appointees wanted it to procure the machine, examine it, and report back, according to two former administration officials with knowledge of the request. Staff were also told not to warn the manufacturer of any flaws they found, a break from standard practice.

Career staff found the proposal alarming, according to one of the former officials. CISA normally works to stop hackers, not to carry out intrusions of its own, and employees feared they were being drawn into political interference.

'My thought was they could keep it in their back pocket to invalidate any [election] results they don't like,' the former official said. 'This goes against everything CISA represents.'

The operation never happened. Staff repeatedly told the appointees it was not possible, partly because the specialists who could have carried out such a task had just been let go in cuts driven by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency. The appointees eventually stopped pressing.

The same agency had declared the 2020 contest the most secure in American history after Trump refused to concede, and its then director, Chris Krebs, was sacked for rejecting the fraud claims. Former officials said staff read the new request as an effort to produce the opposite finding and set it against the 2020 result.

An Agency Stripped of Staff and Funding

The request came as the administration was cutting the agency's staff and budget. Since Trump returned to office, more than 1,000 CISA employees have been laid off or pushed out, reducing the workforce by roughly a third.

According to the administration's Fiscal Year 2027 budget request, the agency would lose a further 700 million dollars (about 530 million pounds) and its election security programme would be scrapped outright, a move the budget documents indicate could cut around 900 more posts.

For years the agency, created under a law Trump signed in 2018, ran penetration tests on state systems, briefed secretaries of state, and paid for network sensors. Much of that support vanished ahead of the 2026 midterms, and Democratic lawmakers have demanded to know why money Congress set aside for election security is going unused.

States Say Trust Has Been Broken

The strain extends beyond staffing. In reviving disputed claims about 2020, the administration declassified records that included sensitive material states had shared with CISA in confidence, among them a log of activity monitored on Election Day. Officials who had spent years building that relationship with the agency said the disclosure broke their trust in it.

The CISA request was not the only federal move on voting machines. The director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, oversaw an operation to seize election machines in Puerto Rico, but the contractor hired to examine them, Mojave Research, found nothing to support the fraud claims and its work was not renewed.

In Missouri, a Justice Department official phoned local clerks seeking access to the Dominion equipment used in 2020.

The White House defended its handling of election security. A spokesperson said Trump had done more than any other president to ensure free and fair elections, and argued that releasing the records was the kind of transparency news organisations should welcome. DHS and CISA did not respond to questions.

Adrian Fontes, the Arizona secretary of state, said he no longer judged the White House by its words. 'I don't pay attention to what the president says. I pay attention to what his administration does,' he said. 'And what they've done is basically cut us off and left us on our own.'

That distrust surfaced again over the summer. On 16 July, Trump used a national address to repeat unproven claims about voting machines, which many officials dismissed as a rerun of theories already rejected.

Weeks later, CISA's acting director told states the department was only then drafting a plan to secure the election, with early voting almost underway. The 13-page document appeared on 24 September.

Several officials called it too late to matter. They said their own preparations would keep the midterms secure, but warned that the greater risk now is political rather than technical: that an administration which stepped back from the work may still dispute the result if its favoured candidates lose in November.