The midterms are just months away, yet the Trump administration has spent the last year systematically slashing agency staff and scuttling initiatives responsible for detecting and disrupting foreign disinformation operations in American elections. Even as the administration has raised alarms about foreign disinformation amid the conflict in Iran, it has depleted its own ability to respond by dismantling centers that tracked foreign influence and hollowing out expertise on information warfare.
In 2024, China and Russia targeted congressional races with disinformation in addition to taking aiming at the presidential election. In the aftermath, the government should have reinforced institutional guardrails to help reduce the reach of such campaigns. Instead, the Trump administration has left this year’s congressional races even more susceptible to manipulation by foreign state-sponsored trolls and deepfakes by curtailing relevant agency budgets and dismissing necessary personnel.
Despite falsehoods promoted by Trump and his allies, there is no evidence that foreign governments successfully interfered in past U.S. elections by affecting voting machines or the vote-counting process in any way. But unlike voting machine manipulation, foreign state-sponsored disinformation campaigns have unfortunately become a common feature of our elections.
In 2024, foreign operations embraced generative AI to increase their reach and sophistication, using it to create deepfake images and video and to write content for fake news articles and bots. Foreign malign influence tactics are also becoming more difficult to detect thanks to AI’s increasing abilities. The evolving threat means the recent agency cuts have come at a particularly bad time.
Those cuts have been brutal. Between January and August 2025, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence had already slashed more than 500 staff members — roughly 30 percent of its workforce — when then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced that the agency would eliminate additional positions and scale back the Foreign Malign Influence Center, responsible for tracking foreign disinformation campaigns. The office had uncovered influence operations in prior elections, including an Iran-backed effort targeting Trump. The national intelligence office has since reassigned many of the center’s duties to other offices, resulting in fragmentation.
Early in the second Trump administration, meanwhile, the FBI quietly shuttered a task force dedicated to investigating foreign deception operations and sharing information with state and local officials and social media companies. The first Trump administration had created the task force after Russia’s attempts to influence the 2016 election.
The current administration has also shed staff at the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency who focused on foreign disinformation. The agency, which coordinates and advises on the security of election infrastructure as well as of other critical infrastructure sectors, has lost about a third of its workforce, and hundreds more positions have been reassigned. (Trump’s newest budget proposal would further shrink the agency.) Reportedly among the positions jettisoned were more than a dozen Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency staffers who monitored foreign disinformation campaigns in elections. Meanwhile, the State Department closed the Global Engagement Center, another group established to coordinate responses to foreign propaganda and misinformation from Russia, China, and Iran. (That center is not focused exclusively on election falsehoods).
The dismantled teams, slashed staff, and reduced expertise mean that the federal government is underprepared to respond in an election cycle where Iran, China, and Russia are especially incentivized to try to influence results.
Though the federal government enjoys a distinct advantage in detecting operations and should make every effort to improve preparedness and find a way to recover from the staff cuts, fortifying elections against foreign disinformation will require greater coordination between researchers, nonpartisan organizations, states, and election officials.
