Hegseth says U.S. National Security Agency and other military intelligence and cybersecurity forces will guard election systems in November
That the nation’s security agencies will be on the lookout for bad actors attempting to subvert our 2026 midterm elections is not a new thing. They’ve done this for the past decade, ever since in 2017 it was deemed “critical infrastructure”. From then on, military cybersecurity experts and a separate civilian infrastructure have been routinely called upon to protect us against hackers.
That military cybersecurity agency last week released an election infrastructure security plan that lays out potential threats to election systems and lists services it would offer to election officials to protect the vote.
What is different is that the Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said this on Monday, and we are in an era that could be called “post-infrastructure”. Hegseth’s announcement comes after President Donald Trump gutted the civilian agency specifically created to safeguard election infrastructure, a division of the Department of Homeland Security called the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
Readers may recall that it was the head of that civilian-led agency, Director Christopher Krebs, who labeled the 2020 election “the safest in history,” without fraud. So this time back in office, Trump saw to it that it didn’t exist any longer. The Russians are already having a field day.
To top it off, in many states, voting has already begun. Many election experts say “if the administration was serious about assisting state and local election officials, they shouldn’t have dismantled all of the federal government’s election cybersecurity capacity and fired all their experts in early 2025”.
The president continues to push false claims that U.S. elections are rife with fraud — and that he won the 2020 election, which he did not — while trying to interfere with longstanding and proven election procedures.
To be clear – the United States Constitution designates conducting elections as entirely the job of the states. It assigns no role to the executive branch and none to the president.
