In a “targeted” attack on government officials who successfully defended against foreign-malign influence on U.S. elections, the Trump Administration has dismantled much of America’s election-security response team. From Steven Lee Myers, Julian E. Barnes and Sheera Frenkel in The New York Times:
The administration has already reassigned several dozen officials working on the issue at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and forced out others at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security, they said. The cuts have focused on people who were not only combating false content online but also working on broader safeguards to protect elections from cyberattacks or other attempts to disrupt voting systems. In last year’s election, the teams tracked and publicized numerous influence operations from Russia, China and Iran to blunt their impact on unsuspecting voters.
The changes alarmed experts, NYT added, asserting that the targeted changes will “leave the United States defenseless against covert foreign influence operations” and assist foreign adversaries in their attempts to sabotage democracy. Arizona Secretary of State, Adrian Fontes, likened the changes to standing down NOAA during hurricane season.
This decision undermines Arizona’s election security at a time when our enemies around the world are using online tools to push their agendas and ideologies into our very homes.
As the Times mentioned, chaos inside CISA includes writing stated policy that’s kinder to Russia—not to mention firing CISA employees who “policed misinformation.”
AUTHOR FOOTNOTE
“Sabotage for the sake of sabotage” is the summary headline here. If you accept the axiom that Donald is working for, and doing bidding of, Vladimir Putin‘s Russia, opening the door for further cyberattacks by the Kremlin (and other hostile nations) makes a whole lot more sense.
And Fontes’ comparison to shutting down NOAA during hurricane season is quite apt since we are fast-approaching hurricane season in 2025 with distinctly and purposely rat-effed disaster response—including NOAA. From our post detailing Trump mob’s sabotage on Feb 27th (a week after Fontes made the comparison): “The United States’ ability to forecast the weather is in jeopardy as one of those locations maintains the supercomputers that run our weather prediction models.”
