Election experts are sounding the alarm over the Trump administration’s wide-reaching changes to the federal bureaucracy, which is impacting the cybersecurity agency responsible for protecting the nation’s critical cyber and physical infrastructure.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has paused its election security work while it conducts a review of “all election security related funding, products, activities, and personnel.”

Election experts say service interruptions and changes could compromise the safety and security of U.S. elections. David Levine, a senior fellow at the University of Maryland’s Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement and a former election official, said the administration’s recent moves make U.S. elections "more vulnerable to attacks by malign actors, including foreign adversaries.”

“My concerns are that the recent efforts by the administration to dismantle federal election efforts raise questions about our ability to protect elections, our ability to combat disinformation, our ability for the federal government to provide security resources to state and local partners, to give specialized assistance and to be able to coordinate efforts to manage risk with election infrastructure,” Levine said.

CISA’s mission is to defend the country’s most important infrastructure, including election infrastructure. It was established in 2018 and is part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

CISA not only helps defend election infrastructure but has also worked to tackle election disinformation and misinformation, though Trump and the agency haven’t always seen eye to eye. Its first director, Chris Krebs, was fired after officials, include a top official at CISA, declared the 2020 election “was the most secure in American history” and that “there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”

The second Trump administration, with the help of Elon Musk and the Department of........

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