The Trump administration is targeting government officials who had been flagging foreign interference in U.S. elections, despite ongoing concerns that adversaries are stoking political and social divisions by spreading propaganda and disinformation online, current and former government officials said.

The administration has already reassigned several dozen officials working on the issue at the FBI and forced out others at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security, they said.

The cuts have focused on people who were not only combating false content online but also working on broader safeguards to protect elections from cyberattacks or other attempts to disrupt voting systems. In last year’s election, the teams tracked and publicized numerous influence operations from Russia, China and Iran to blunt their impact on unsuspecting voters.

Experts are alarmed that the cuts could leave the United States defenseless against covert foreign influence operations and embolden foreign adversaries seeking to disrupt democratic governments.

Arizona’s secretary of state, Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, warned in a letter to President Donald Trump that the cuts were comparable to shutting down the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration before hurricane season.

“This decision undermines Arizona’s election security,” he wrote, “at a time when our enemies around the world are using online tools to push their agendas and ideologies into our very homes.”

Trump and other officials have said that in the guise of fighting misinformation and disinformation, the government had infringed on free speech rights of Americans. Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant secretary at DHS, said that the cybersecurity agency “is undertaking an evaluation of how it has executed its election security mission with a particular focus on any work related to mis-, dis-, and malinformation,” and that while that is continuing, personnel who had worked on those issues “have been placed on administrative leave.”

Acting on one of Trump’s first executive orders, Attorney General Pam Bondi on Feb. 5 shut down an FBI task force that had been formed after Russia intervened in the 2016 presidential election and reassigned several dozen officials and agents who had been involved, the officials said. The FBI confirmed in a statement the agency “has fully complied” with Bondi’s directive to disband the task force.

CISA has also forced out more than a dozen officials who had been monitoring foreign influence operations targeting the nation’s elections. They were among the more than 130 positions eliminated in total at the agency, according to a department statement.

On Friday, an internal memorandum from the agency’s acting director, Bridget E. Bean, announced the suspension of funding for a program that coordinated election security on the federal, state and local levels.

Even before Trump returned to the White House, Republicans on Capitol Hill had refused to renew the mandate for the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, the most prominent government agency fighting propaganda from Russia and China. It shut down in December. Many of its staff of 125 have since been reassigned, while others have left or not had their contracts renewed, officials said.

In recent years, many Republicans have been skeptical of warnings about disinformation campaigns. They accused Democrats of demonizing political views with which they disagreed as “Russian propaganda,” and they viewed warnings about “disinformation” as a way to pressure social media companies to censor speech supporting Trump’s views.