After censorship scandal, are agency staffers off the hook?

The firing of federal bureaucrats from an agency a congressional panel accused of engaging in a broad censorship effort may be too light a punishment, says the former No. 2 at the Department of Homeland Security.

The Trump administration slashed the workforces of several agencies last week, including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, known as the CISA, by about 130 employees after accusations of censorship and election meddling there.

Meanwhile, the DHS is pausing election activities for the CISA , pending a review of the agency, The Associated Press reported.

The CISA was established in 2018 under the first Trump administration’s DHS and was originally intended to protect oil and natural gas pipelines and other critical infrastructure from cyberattacks. But agency bureaucrats quickly expanded the mission to elections. A congressional investigation concluded the CISA worked with big tech firms to censor political speech in the name of combating election-related “misinformation.”

“Employees there were actively censoring their fellow Americans. They were violating their civil rights and should be prosecuted,” Ken Cuccinelli, former acting deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, told The Daily Signal. “Bureaucrats in the future who want to abuse their power and violate the civil rights of their fellow Americans are less likely to do so if those who did so before were prosecuted. Not only is it a deterrence, but it’s also justice for people who were harmed.”

In June 2023, the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government released a report that found the CISA considered creating an anti-misinformation “rapid response team” to physically deploy across the United States.

The report also said the CISA moved its censorship operation to a CISA-funded nonprofit to “avoid the appearance of government propaganda” after the Biden administration was sued in federal court. The House panel also reported the CISA scrubbed its website of references to its domestic surveillance and censorship activities.

Additionally, the Twitter Files report, an investigation launched after Elon Musk bought the social media giant, found government agencies—including the CISA—working with Twitter to block content such as the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop and other news.

However, Jen Easterly, CISA director during the Biden administration, said last year, “CISA does not censor, has never censored.”

It’s not clear how many of the 130 employees worked on elections or were involved in censorship. The CISA referred questions to DHS, which did not respond to questions about details of the situation.

“Under President Trump’s leadership, we are making sweeping cuts and reform across the federal government to eliminate egregious waste and incompetence that has been happening for decades at the expense of the American taxpayer,” a DHS spokesperson said in an email response, adding the actions would save taxpayers about $50 million on top of an “incalculable” amount in increased accountability.

“DHS component leads identified non-mission critical personnel in probationary status. We are actively identifying other wasteful positions and offices that [do not] fulfill DHS’ mission,” the DHS spokesperson said.

During the waning days of the Obama administration in early January 2017, Obama’s Department of Homeland Security designated the election system as “critical infrastructure.”

Cuccinelli, now the national chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative and a former Virginia attorney general, said “elections were not part of the original mission” of the CISA.

“The tradeoff to allowing a government agency to get involved in election security is that if you do, it opens the door to abuse and weaponization,” Cuccinelli said. “In this particular time of government cost-benefit analysis, it isn’t worth it.”

The CISA’s duties of protecting infrastructure such as roads, pipelines, and bridges on the cyber level could be easily transferred to the Department of Transportation, Cuccinelli said, while the Department of Energy could address cyber concerns regarding the electric grid.

“The only legitimate role for the federal government in elections is to determine if there has been foreign hacking,” he said, noting divisions within the DHS could already address that while the Justice Department could prosecute such cases.

Still, many of the Left were upset over the cuts.

The Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal think tank at New York University known for opposing election integrity laws such as voter ID, blasted the staffing cuts, asserting in an X post, “The Trump administration is taking aim at our free, fair, and secure elections.”

Politico published a piece sympathetic to anonymously quoted federal employees who said some of the CISA’s most experienced national security staff were there on a probationary status because the agency hired personnel under a special workforce retention program started in 2021. In some cases, people with national security IT experience—including government employees from other agencies—were lured to the CISA with higher pay but in exchange for probationary status.

The CISA did not prevent or detect a 2020 cyber attack on federal and corporate computer systems in the United States that were suspected to have been linked to the Russian government, Cuccinelli added.

As my book, “The Myth of Voter Suppression,” noted, about a year after then-CISA chief Christopher Krebs said the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history” and that there was “no indication or evidence that there was any sort of hacking,” federal prosecutors in New York unsealed an indictment that charged two Iranians with hacking the New York state computer election system and stealing voter registration data with the intent to carry out a cyber-intimidation campaign against Republican members of Congress and Trump campaign officials as well as Democrat voters in the November 2020 election.

Absent the hacking, Trump would have still lost the heavily blue New York state, but it does indicate that the CISA didn’t catch the hacking.

[Editor’s note: This story originally was published by The Daily Signal.]