Agency Origins and Critical Infrastructure Designation
CISA’s roots trace back to 2007, when the National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD) was formed as a component of DHS. NPPD’s goal was to advance the department’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 became CISA’s first director, and former deputy under-secretary Matthew Travis served as its first deputy director.
The agency is headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, and oversees all levels of the federal government while coordinating with U.S. states to improve cybersecurity against private and nation-state hackers. With the 2018 act, 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.
U.S. election systems were designated critical infrastructure in January 2017, a move that made them eligible for prioritized federal cybersecurity assistance. Under the hood, that designation means CISA can deploy its technical capabilities — including remote vulnerability scanning and on-site assessments — to help harden systems that remain entirely under state and local control. The division of labor is constitutionally rooted: The administration of elections is a state responsibility, and CISA’s role is supportive, not operational.
2024 Election Security Findings
Around the 2024 election, CISA issued joint statements with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the FBI. The 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 are not controversial among election administrators; they are standard practice in most jurisdictions.
The agency’s history includes notable actions on election security. On January 22, 2019, CISA issued its first Emergency Directive (19-01: Mitigate DNS Infrastructure Tampering), 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.” In 2020, CISA created a website titled Rumor Control to rebut disinformation associated with the 2020 United States 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.
Policy Debate Over CISA’s Role
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.
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.
Sources
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