The U.S. National Security Agency and other military intelligence and cybersecurity forces will guard election systems during the November midterms, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Monday.

Military cybersecurity experts have routinely helped monitor systems and deter potential hackers since election equipment was designated “ critical infrastructure ” in 2017.

But Hegseth's announcement comes after President Donald Trump gutted the civilian agency specifically created to safeguard election infrastructure, a division of the Department of Homeland Security called the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. That agency last week released an election infrastructure security plan that lays out potential threats to election systems and lists services it would offer to election officials to protect the vote.

Both announcements come just weeks before Election Day on Nov. 3 and with early voting already underway. The short timeline “suggests this is just theater,” said David Becker, a former U.S. Justice Department attorney who leads the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation & Research.

“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,” he said.

Though cybersecurity assistance from the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command is routine, many elections experts, civil rights groups and Democratic election officials are on guard for signs of meddling in voting or ballot counting by the Trump administration. The president continues to push false claims that elections are rife with fraud while trying to interfere with longstanding election procedures.

The U.S. Supreme Court blocked an attempt by Trump to restrict mail voting but has allowed the use of a federal database to check the citizenship of voters.

In a memo dated Sept. 22 and publicly announced Monday, Hegseth directed defense intelligence officials to mobilize every resource “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.”

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Associated Press writer Nicholas Riccardi in Denver contributed to this report.