The Trump administration is moving to condition more than $1 billion in Department of Homeland Security grants on states adopting a sweeping set of election changes, CNN reported June 22, 2026. Under new rules for several DHS grant programs, states would have to phase out certain electronic voting systems in favor of hand-marked paper ballots and run their voter rolls through a contested DHS citizenship-verification database.
The grants are a primary federal source of funding for state and local terrorism prevention, infrastructure protection, and disaster preparedness. States that refuse the election conditions reportedly face roughly a 20% cut in their DHS grant funding. Jurisdictions that would be forced to change include Delaware, Georgia, Nevada, South Carolina, and Los Angeles County.
The plan builds on Trump's 2025 executive order on elections, which courts have repeatedly blocked; a January 2026 ruling by U.S. District Judge John Chun found it unconstitutionally pressured states, because the president lacks authority to dictate how states run their elections. A former Justice Department lawyer predicted the new requirements “will be blocked in the courts.” Using disaster-and-terrorism grant money as leverage over election administration is a new escalation of the administration's midterm push (see The Homeland Security Secretary Says He'd 'Throw Out the Constitution' to Stop Noncitizen Voting, Then Walks It Back).
Update (September 28, 2026): a federal judge vacated the election conditions. U.S. District Judge Amir H. Ali in Washington ruled for Nashville and Davidson County, Tennessee; Columbus, Ohio; and the Texas counties of El Paso, Harris, Dallas and Travis, which sued in August. He threw out the election-administration conditions and the 20 percent holdback in the Fiscal Year 2026 Homeland Security Grant Program, along with FEMA's August 10 guidance implementing them, and declined the Justice Department's request to limit the relief to the jurisdictions that sued. The holdback affected “over $200 million in grant funds,” the opinion says.
The conditions were specific: a plan to replace barcode and QR-code voting systems with hand-marked paper ballots, a 5 percent manual audit after each election, reconciling the number of voters with the number of ballots, running the whole voter file through the SAVE citizenship system within 120 days, and checking the citizenship of poll workers, election-system operators and vendors, all at the recipients' own expense. Ali held that the counterterrorism statute lets FEMA fund projects, not extract reforms: “The statute does not authorize FEMA to withhold counterterrorism grants until states and high-risk urban areas achieve policy objectives on their own dime.” The conditions, he wrote, fall “well outside of preparing for or responding to” acts of terrorism. On the administration's stated aim of voter confidence: “Again, the court does not question that this may be a laudable goal, but it is not a counterterrorism goal.”
He ruled on the statute and did not reach the constitutional claims, and the separate requirement to spend at least 3 percent of the grants on election security was not challenged. The Justice Department declined to comment. A parallel suit by two dozen states over conditions on disaster and homeland-security money is still pending (see More Than Two Dozen States Sue Over Trump's Demand That They Change Their Elections and Help ICE to Get Disaster Aid).