Democrats press Trump administration for election-security briefings before midterms

Democratic senators are warning that the Trump administration’s thin flow of election-security briefings could leave lawmakers exposed to cyber threats and foreign interference as the November 3 midterms draw closer. In a letter, they said the only briefing they have received came from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and that requests for similar sessions from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency went unanswered.

The complaint goes to the core of how federal election protection is supposed to work. Congress has long relied on those briefings to track threats to critical infrastructure and to understand how foreign adversaries might try to influence the vote. The Democrats said there had been no meaningful effort to coordinate information sharing or incident response across executive branch agencies, and no clear plan to get timely warnings to election officials and other stakeholders.

Mark R. Warner, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, had already raised the alarm in May, saying state and local officials were reporting that CISA was no longer providing the same training, intelligence sharing and cybersecurity help it had offered in earlier cycles. Warner also pointed to the Department of Homeland Security’s FY2027 budget proposal, which would cut 14 CISA election-security employees and eliminate the program budget entirely, including information-sharing and election-security advisor positions.

House Homeland Security Democrats added to that pressure on June 1, asking DHS what it planned to do with election-security funding Congress had recently restored in the FY2026 appropriations bill. CISA’s own 2024 Year in Review showed why that money matters: since January 2023, the agency said it had carried out more than 700 cyber assessments and nearly 1,300 physical security assessments for election stakeholders, and it had sent weekly vulnerability-scanning reports to nearly 1,000 election infrastructure stakeholders.

An ODNI election-security fact sheet released in February 2024 said state and local officials administer elections, but federal departments and agencies provide critical help in mitigating election-security challenges. That division of labor is now under strain, as Democrats argue that the Trump administration’s renewed focus on disproven claims about the 2020 election is distracting from the practical work of defending machines, networks and local election offices. A DHS spokesperson said CISA under Trump remained committed to timely, actionable cyber threat intelligence and defense against nation-state and criminal cyber threats, while accusing the agency under Joe Biden of focusing on censorship and electioneering. With 33 Senate seats on the ballot in 2026, the fight over briefings is already testing confidence in the machinery that will run the vote.