Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the NSA and military cyber forces to guard U.S. election systems for the November midterms, a step critics dismiss as theater.
AP News reported that Hegseth said Monday the U.S. National Security Agency and other military intelligence and cybersecurity forces will protect election systems ahead of the November contests.
The directive comes with early voting already underway and Election Day set for Nov. 3. Hegseth’s memo, dated Sept. 22 and announced publicly Monday, tells defense intelligence officials to mobilize every available resource for that mission.
In the memo, Hegseth framed the order as a defense against outside interference, not a revise of how states run their own elections.
"to defend our election infrastructure from foreign malign influence and ensure that every lawful voter can cast their ballot free from foreign intimidation, coercion, or fear."
Election equipment has carried a “critical infrastructure” label since 2017. Since that designation, military cybersecurity experts have routinely helped monitor systems and deter potential hackers.
Support from the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command fits that longer pattern. Hegseth’s order puts the same kind of capability on a clear midterm footing weeks before ballots are fully counted nationwide.
Separate from the Pentagon track, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency released an election infrastructure security plan last week. CISA, part of the Department of Homeland Security, outlined potential threats to election systems and listed services it can offer local election officials.
David Becker, a former Justice Department attorney who leads the Center for Election Innovation & Research, rejected the announcement’s value.
Becker said the move “suggests this is just theater,” and argued the administration undercut its own credibility earlier.
"If the administration was serious about assisting state and local election officials, they shouldn’t have dismantled all of the federal government’s election cybersecurity capacity and fired all their experts in early 2025,"
That critique treats staffing changes at the civilian cyber agency as proof the new military tasking cannot be serious. It does not erase the foreign-threat problem Hegseth named in the memo, or the fact that NSA and Cyber Command assistance has been part of the landscape for years.
The core standard in Hegseth’s directive is straightforward. Lawful voters should be able to cast ballots without foreign intimidation, coercion, or fear. Systems that count those ballots should not be soft targets for hostile actors.
Related election fights have already reached the Supreme Court. The court blocked an attempt to restrict mail voting and has allowed use of a federal database to check the citizenship of voters. Citizenship checks and hardened cyber defenses answer different parts of the same demand: elections that belong to eligible American voters, not to outside pressure or sloppy process.
Hegseth’s public order lands late in the calendar, memo in late September, announcement this week, Election Day on Nov. 3, with early voting already in progress. The compressed window is real. So is the standing practice of using military cyber expertise once election gear was tagged critical infrastructure nearly a decade ago.
State and local officials still run the mechanics of voting. Federal cyber support, civilian or military, is supposed to backstop the machinery against intrusion and disruption. Hegseth cast the NSA role in those terms: foreign malign influence, not a federal takeover of precincts.
Becker’s “theater” line will satisfy readers who distrust any Trump administration move on elections. It does less to answer why foreign cyber pressure would ignore an open midterm, or why routine NSA and Cyber Command monitoring would suddenly become illegitimate when a defense secretary puts it in writing.
Secure systems and lawful ballots are not opposing goals. They are the bare minimum voters should expect every cycle.
