Adrian Fontes told the man running federal election security this morning that he does not trust him.
“I don’t trust you,” Arizona’s chief election officer said. “Your boss came out there and said: We are going to criminalize the work you do. They don’t work with us, they work against us.”
The help Fontes turned down barely exists. The agency Congress built to defend voting systems from foreign attack has run Trump’s second term with no director. It put seventeen election security staff on leave in February 2025 and killed the election work. It cut ten million dollars from the states’ threat-sharing centre, then shut the centre down; the emailed reason: the work “no longer supports Department priorities.” Near a thousand people, a third of the agency, are gone.
The agency says its “election security services remain fully in place.” Homeland Security calls the old budget “ballooning,” says it hid “censorship, branding, and electioneering,” and says the cuts “eliminate duplication.”
Georgia’s Republican secretary of state counted what that costs him: “If you go back to 2020, we had 30 different federal threat briefings. This year we received none.”
None.
