CISA election, disinformation officials placed on administrative leave, sources say  – CyberScoop

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency placed several members of its election security group on administrative leave last week, multiple sources familiar with the situation told CyberScoop.

According to one source, the moves happened Thursday and Friday of last week and were targeted at employees focused on CISA’s mis-, dis- and malinformation teams. The moves include four employees currently working on or assigned to the team, two more that left the team in the past four years but still hold positions at the Department of Homeland Security, and another two that work on elections misinformation or disinformation at DHS.

A second source confirmed that some, but not all members of CISA’s election security team, were placed on leave last week.  

The extent of the teams impacted by the decree is unclear. A third source told CyberScoop that a CISA-hosted event in Florida on cybersecurity and artificial intelligence was canceled at the last minute Friday, with the agency employee telling event planners they were being placed on leave. The individual said they had received notice of their impending leave that same day, according to text of the email shared with CyberScoop.

The decision to sideline DHS and CISA employees who previously or currently on mis- and disinformation happened the same week that Attorney General Pam Bondi moved to dissolve the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, which was stood up in 2017 to counter efforts by countries like Russia, China, Iran and others from meddling in U.S. elections, often through online propaganda campaigns.

When reached for comment, CISA’s press office referred CyberScoop to DHS’ Office of Public Affairs, which did not respond to multiple inquiries.  

Politico first reported on the moves Friday.

Kim Wyman, former Republican Secretary of State for Washington and former election security lead at CISA under the Biden administration, told CyberScoop that the impact of shuttering CISA’s mis- and disinformation work will fall mostly on smaller election jurisdictions that are not immune from the impact of online propaganda, but lack the resources, funding or expertise to effectively confront it.

“It’s overwhelming for those medium and small-sized jurisdictions, and the federal government and specifically CISA played a really important role of leveling that playing field. That’s the big void that’s going to occur,” Wyman said. “The larger jurisdictions are going to be able to pivot … but the small and medium counties were already struggling, and this is going to be a blow.”

CISA is the federal government’s lead agency for engaging with states and other stakeholders on election security initiatives after the sector was declared critical infrastructure following the 2016 presidential election.

Initially, the agency’s work focused heavily on leveraging its internal technical expertise to help states and localities identify and close off security vulnerabilities in election-related infrastructure, such as voting machines and voter registration systems.

That work continues to this day, after leadership quickly realized that bad actors spreading false information to undermine faith in the American electoral system was a key strategy of countries like Russia and China.

Following the 2018 midterms, CISA under then-Director Chris Krebs began exploring ways to coordinate messaging with state and local officials to raise awareness among the general public and push back on some of the biggest falsehoods. That included the use of clever marketing approaches — like a fictional debate about whether pineapple belongs on pizza — to illustrate how foreign counties exploit online anger and disagreement for their own ends.

CISA’s dis- and misinformation work has always been largely focused on foreign influence campaigns, but the 2020 election scrambled that approach when the campaign of then-Republican President Donald Trump — in an effort to stay in power following his loss to Democrat Joe Biden — began echoing many of the falsehoods about election hacks and vote-switching that CISA had spent the past two years debunking.

Things came to a head when Trump fired Krebs after he publicly refuted claims that the 2020 election was subject to massive fraud and insisted no such evidence existed. Krebs’ assertion that the election was not stolen was validated through dozens of failed court challenges by the Trump campaign that failed to identify or overturn a single fraudulent vote.

But the episode shattered the bipartisan support for CISA in Washington, and Republicans like House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, began attacking the agency’s disinformation work as a form of censorship. 

The Biden administration’s stumbles around the issue — including a short-lived advisory board focused on disinformation that was quickly shuttered in the face of opposition on the left and right — only heightened those criticisms. Under CISA Director Jen Easterly, the agency scaled back its engagement with social media companies around disinformation in 2022 in the face of court challenges. 

A Supreme Court decision last year concluded that CISA’s work with social media companies did not constitute government suppression of free speech, and Easterly has adamantly asserted that CISA never pressured or demanded that social media companies censor American speech.

By 2024, conservative playbooks like Project 2025 that sought to guide Trump’s second term were calling for CISA to end all disinformation work and become less involved in supporting state and local elections. Newly confirmed Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem told lawmakers in her confirmation hearing that CISA’s work has gotten “far off-mission” and that “the misinformation and disinformation that they have stuck their toe into and meddled with should be refocused back onto what their job is.”

Wyman noted that some of the agency’s work most controversial with Republicans, such as its interactions with social media companies, happened as election officials were adapting to an ongoing pandemic and dealing with widespread confusion from voters about basic voting procedures due to rampant mis- and disinformation online. 

“At the time you had this onslaught of people making commentary about the election process on social media, and we were just trying to get the information out about the time, manner and place of the elections,” Wyman said.

While Republican critics on the Hill have charged that CISA has become too focused on its disinformation mission, the agency still spends the bulk of its time on other missions, like protecting civilian federal networks. It appears to dedicate only a small fraction of its $3 billion budget to the problem.

In a House hearing last month, Brandon Wales, former CISA executive director, was asked how much the agency spent on its disinformation work.

“Last time we looked at this it was something less than $2 million,” said Wales, adding that he did not believe the work detracted from CISA’s other missions.

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