Let me tell you what sabotage looks like when you read it out of a budget document. Markwayne Mullin and Nick Anderson, the acting head of CISA, have by act and omission removed the connective tissue between federal intelligence and the local officials who run the polls. The midterm is two months out.
The facts are not complicated. NPR obtained a letter this week from Sen. Alex Padilla of California and Rep. Joseph Morelle of New York — the ranking Democrats on the committees that oversee federal elections. The letter asks why $39.6 million Congress appropriated in April for the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center has not been released.
The EI-ISAC was a free, voluntary service that pushed the latest intelligence to state, local, tribal, and territorial election officials on how foreign adversaries and domestic actors were targeting election infrastructure. After funding cuts in March of last year, the center was reduced to a paid membership model. “Under-resourced communities cannot afford” the paid model, the lawmakers wrote.
I want you to think about who that hits. It does not hit Phoenix or Cook County or any of the big urban jurisdictions with their own intelligence analysts. It hits the clerk in a county of eight thousand people who has a part-time staff and a recorder who doubles as the treasurer. It hits the tribal election office on a reservation where the broadband cuts out twice a week. It hits the territorial office in a place most Americans could not find on a map. Those are the offices the EI-ISAC was built to reach. Those are the offices that just got priced out.
The threats named in the letter — Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, the broader set of actors CISA itself lists on its public advisories at cisa.gov — are not abstractions. They are the reason the EI-ISAC exists. The intelligence-sharing work the center does is what tells a county clerk in Plentywood, Montana, or a recorder in a small Georgia county what the foreign adversaries are actually trying on election infrastructure. Pull that out and the smallest counties are flying blind on the Tuesday that matters most.
Adrian Fontes, the Arizona secretary of state, said it plain to NPR: “DHS is actively sabotaging elections by not funding these programs.” That word — sabotaging — is doing the work Fontes intended. He is not being dramatic. He is being accurate to what his office and every county clerk in his state just lost.
The bipartisan critique lands too. Padilla and Morelle did not discover this problem eighteen months ago, when it would have done some good. They have had eighteen months to use the considerable power of their committee positions to fix it. They waited until two months before the midterm to write a letter. The FY2026 DHS appropriations bill that contains the $39.6 million passed in April. It has been sitting in front of them. They have not explained why.
Where were you, Senator. Where were you, Congressman. Where were you when the EI-ISAC went paid-only in March of last year and every small county in your state lost the service. You had the gavel. You did not use it. Now, two months before an election, you want the moment to look like a rescue. That is not a rescue. That is a campaign document.
I want to be honest about one thing, because the reader in the place I used to be deserves an honest writer.
Fontes himself, for all his “actively sabotaging” language, said he is “confident that states will carry out safe, secure, and accessible elections for every eligible voter, despite the loss in federal support,” and that this moment, in his own telling, will “serve as a reminder that states hold the power over election administration.” The federal program is not coming back in this window. The states will carry this election. They have carried elections before. They will carry this one.
But carrying it without the threat intel the EI-ISAC used to push out for free means the smallest counties carry the heaviest weight. The people who staffed the EI-ISAC and ran CISA’s election work did not sign up to be the political weapon of any administration. They signed up to defend the vote.
The people who actually run this republic are not in Washington. They are the county clerks. They are the recorders. They are the women and men who, on a Tuesday in November, will unlock the polling place at six in the morning, set up the machines, count the ballots at the end of the night, and trust that the federal government is, at minimum, sharing the threat picture with them. If that trust is going to mean anything, the federal government has to do its part.
Two months is not a long time. But it is enough, if the will is there, to do the small thing that was always supposed to be done. Pay for the service. Send the intelligence. Trust the clerk to do her job.