The security agency for cyber security and infrastructure has frozen all its election safety work and is reviewing everything he has done to help the state and local officials help secure their election over the past eight years, Wired learned. The move is the first important example of the country’s cyber defense agency that accommodates President Donald Trump’s false claims of election fraud and online censorship.

In a memo sent to all employees of the CISA on Friday and acquired by Wired, the acting director of CISA, Bridget Bean, said she was “reviewing” a review and assessment “of each post at the agency associated with the agency election safety recommends and counteract misinformation, ‘as well as every election safety and [mis-, dis-, and malinformation] Product, activity, service and program conducted ”since the federal government was named critical infrastructure in 2017 as a critical infrastructure.

“CISA will interrupt all election safety activities to the completion of this review,” Bean added. The agency is also reducing funding for these activities at the election infrastructure information and analysis center, a group funded by the Department of Home Security which served as a coordinating body for the election community.

In her memo, Bean confirmed that CISA, as the first time reported by Politico, associated employees on February 7 on February 7 with the election safety activities and the MDM MDM program “on administrative leave.

“It is necessary to save the agency’s election safety activities to ensure that CISA focuses exclusively on the execution of its cyber and physical security mission,” she said in the memo.

While Bean is temporarily leading Cisa, she is officially the executive director of the agency, his top career position. The first director of CISA created the executive director role to provide continuity during political transitions. Previously, Bean was a Trump appointment at the Federal Emergency Management Agency during its first term.

In justification of the internal overview of CISA, which concludes on March 6, Bean points to Trump’s executive order on January 20 about ‘termination of federal censorship’. Conservatives argued that CISA censored their speech by coordinating with technical enterprises to identify wrong information online in 2020, during the final year of Trump’s first term. Cisa denied that it had carried out any censorship, and the US Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit over the government’s work. But in the aftermath of the setback, CISA stopped most discussions with technical platforms on online-retailed and disinformation.

CISA and DHS did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Since 2017, state and local election officials have relied on CISA’s expertise and resources – as well as its partnerships with other agencies – to improve their physical and digital security. Through consultations on the spot and online guidance, CISA helped to help election administrators obtain voting infrastructure against hackers, get hardened votes against active shooters and to set up backup plans to handle ballots or power failures.

Electoral supervisors have always struggled to overcome serious financing challenges, but over the past year their work has become even more stressful as intense voter investigations have made way for harassment and even death threats. Election officials from both parties have repeatedly praised CISA for the apolitical support of their work, saying the recommendations of the agency and free security services were critical to increase their own efforts.