The Agency’s Role and Record in the 2024 Election
Around the 2024 election, CISA issued joint statements with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the FBI. Those agencies reported no evidence that malicious activity had compromised the integrity of the vote. They did note that foreign actors sought to influence public opinion — a distinction that matters because influencing voters is not the same as tampering with ballots or tabulation.
CISA also promotes resilience measures that election officials widely endorse. Those include voter-verified paper records, post-election audits, and coordinated incident response. These measures are not controversial among election administrators; they are standard practice in most jurisdictions.
The policy friction arises elsewhere. Some critics argue CISA should stay narrowly focused on cybersecurity rather than countering election-related misinformation. Supporters point to the agency’s role in helping harden systems and argue that information sharing about foreign influence operations falls within its remit to protect critical infrastructure. It is a genuine policy debate, not a factual one about what CISA actually does or has done.
Origins and Evolution of CISA
CISA is a component of DHS, headquartered in Arlington, Virginia. The agency began in 2007 as the National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD). NPPD’s goal was to advance DHS’s national security mission by reducing and eliminating threats to U.S. critical physical and cyber infrastructure.
On November 16, 2018, President Donald Trump signed into law the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Act of 2018, which established CISA as the successor agency to NPPD. Former NPPD under-secretary Christopher Krebs was CISA’s first director, and former deputy under-secretary Matthew Travis was its first deputy director.
With the 2018 law, CISA’s footprint expanded to include roles protecting the census, managing National Special Security Events, and the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It has also been involved in overseeing 5G network security, securing elections, and strengthening the U.S. grid against electromagnetic pulses. The Office for Bombing Prevention leads the national counter-IED effort.
On January 22, 2019, CISA issued its first Emergency Directive, warning that “an active attacker is targeting government organizations” using DNS spoofing techniques to perform man-in-the-middle attacks. Research group FireEye stated that “initial research suggests the actor or actors responsible have a nexus to Iran.”
Policy Debates and the Factual Record
In 2020, CISA created a website titled Rumor Control to rebut disinformation associated with the 2020 U.S. presidential election. On November 12, 2020, CISA issued a press release asserting, “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” On the same day, Director Krebs indicated that he expected to be dismissed from his post by the Trump administration.
As ever, the accurate bottom line is that CISA supports but does not administer elections, and its assessments found no successful attack on the integrity of the 2024 vote. The agency sits within DHS, its critical-infrastructure designation dates to January 2017, and the services it provides — threat intelligence, scanning, assessments, incident response — are precisely the technical tools one would expect from a federal cybersecurity agency working with sovereign states. The debate over whether that portfolio should expand or contract will continue, but the factual record of what CISA has done and not done is clear.
