Trump Dismantles Government Fight Against Foreign Influence Operations

New York Times

20-02-2025

The Trump administration is targeting government officials who had been flagging foreign interference in U.S. elections, despite ongoing concerns that adversaries are stoking political and social divisions by spreading propaganda and disinformation online, current and former government officials said.
The administration has already reassigned several dozen officials working on the issue at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and forced out others at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security, they said.
The cuts have focused on people who were not only combating false content online but also working on broader safeguards to protect elections from cyberattacks or other attempts to disrupt voting systems. In last year's election, the teams tracked and publicized numerous influence operations from Russia, China and Iran to blunt their impact on unsuspecting voters.
Experts are alarmed that the cuts could leave the United States defenseless against covert foreign influence operations and embolden foreign adversaries seeking to disrupt democratic governments.
Arizona's secretary of state, Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, warned in a letter to President Trump that the cuts were comparable to shutting down the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ahead of hurricane season.
'This decision undermines Arizona's election security,' he wrote, 'at a time when our enemies around the world are using online tools to push their agendas and ideologies into our very homes.'
Mr. Trump and other officials have said that in the guise of fighting misinformation and disinformation, the government had infringed on free speech rights of Americans. Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant secretary at D.H.S., said that the cybersecurity agency 'is undertaking an evaluation of how it has executed its election security mission with a particular focus on any work related to mis-, dis-, and malinformation,' and that while that is continuing, personnel who had worked on those issues 'have been placed on administrative leave.'
Acting on one of Mr. Trump's first executive orders, Attorney General Pam Bondi on Feb. 5 shut down a Federal Bureau of Investigation task force that had been formed after Russia intervened in the 2016 presidential election and reassigned several dozen officials and agents who had been involved, the officials said.
CISA has also forced out more than a dozen officials who had been monitoring foreign influence operations targeting the nation's elections. They were among the more than 130 positions eliminated in total at the agency, according to a department statement.
On Friday, an internal memorandum from the agency's acting director, Bridget E. Bean, announced the suspension of funding for a program that coordinated election security on the federal, state and local levels.
Even before Mr. Trump returned to the White House, Republicans on Capitol Hill had refused to renew the mandate for the State Department's Global Engagement Center, the most prominent government agency fighting propaganda from Russia and China. It shut down in December. Many of its staff of 125 have since been reassigned, while others have left or not had their contracts renewed, officials said.
In recent years, many Republicans have been skeptical of warnings about disinformation campaigns. They accused Democrats of demonizing political views with which they disagreed as 'Russian propaganda,' and they viewed warnings about 'disinformation' as a way to pressure social media companies to censor speech supporting Mr. Trump's views.
In one of his first major foreign policy speeches as vice president, JD Vance said that the Biden administration had 'bullied social media companies to censor so-called misinformation.'
Republican supporters of Mr. Trump had telegraphed many of the administration's steps ahead of his election. But the breadth and speed of the efforts to abolish the teams put in place to fight malign activity online have surprised those involved, including engineers at companies like Google and Meta, who have for years regularly exchanged information with government officials, including during Mr. Trump's first term.
CISA has already removed a 'Rumor v. Reality' page on its website, which had provided tips to dispel disinformation about the reliability of the voting process. The internal memorandum from Ms. Bean, first reported by Wired, said that the agency would also conduct a review to correct 'any past activities identified as past misconduct by the federal government related to censorship of protected speech.'
The new director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, has made repeated promises to depoliticize the spy agencies. American officials briefed on her plans say that will include a review of the work done by the office's Foreign Malign Influence Center, which was established by Congress in 2022.
That office, along with the F.B.I. and the cybersecurity agency, regularly disclosed foreign influence operations during last year's presidential campaign, including one from Iran that targeted Mr. Trump, which officials said was trying to prevent his re-election. Many of the officials involved with the efforts to warn the public about foreign influence campaigns at the time emphasized that the work was nonpartisan, and that they had avoided calling out Americans who amplified foreign narratives because of the right to free speech.
A recent report by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a hawkish research organization in Washington, credited the government effort for blunting the impact of foreign influence ahead of November's election by informing voters, for example, that numerous videos being spread online were created by Russia and showed fake people.
'The U.S. government should continue to treat foreign malign influence as a national security issue,' the report said, calling for the agencies to receive 'the proper funding to continue their work.'
Instead, the new administration has followed the recommendations of Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for restructuring the federal government from which Mr. Trump sought to distance himself during the presidential campaign and has now embraced.
Project 2025 called for the closing of the election security unit at CISA, as well as the F.B.I.'s task force. Republicans in Congress and several states have also waged a legal and political campaign against what they claimed was a sweeping 'censorship industrial complex' under the Biden administration.
'I think that they may have drunk their own Kool-Aid in terms of believing that there is this kind of censorship industrial complex that all these people were involved in,' Lawrence Norden, a vice president at the progressive Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, said, referring to the officials now shutting down the teams. 'I'm not sure that they fully understand who everybody is and what they do.'
Lance Hunter, a professor at Augusta University in Georgia, said that eliminating defenses against foreign influence campaigns would leave the United States more vulnerable to them.
'Foreign influence operations are often conducted to attempt to increase the appearance of government ineffectiveness and instability in the country,' he said. 'They are also carried out to disrupt elections and increase division and polarization in the country.'
During his visit to Europe last week, however, Mr. Vance belittled the idea that a foreign adversary like Russia could sway an election in a strong democratic nation, referring to accusations that resulted in Romania overturning the first round of voting in its election.
'If your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousands of dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country,' Mr. Vance said, 'then it wasn't very strong to begin with.'