China, Russia and Iran are investing billions to influence the US midterms

On Jan. 15, Lt. Gen. Joshua Rudd, President Trump’s nominee to lead the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command, pledged before the Senate Armed Services Committee to use the full weight of the nation’s cyber capabilities to protect the U.S. from foreign interference in the upcoming midterm elections. 

It was a reassuring signal that the military apparatus remains vigilant. But the reality of modern information warfare is that securing our midterm election requires far more than Fort Meade. It requires a synchronized, whole-of-government effort that spans the interagency — but it ultimately starts with political will at the White House. 

Rudd’s commitment was particularly welcome because China, Russia and Iran have drastically increased their budgets for influence operations. Russia, for instance, has made a calculated trade-off. Its 2026 budget increased funding for state-run media and information operations by 54 percent — an additional $458 million. As Ukraine’s foreign ministry has noted, Moscow has determined that maintaining the “firehose of falsehood” is as critical to its survival as the supply of artillery shells. 

China, likewise, is investing in the information domain at levels that reflect the importance Beijing places on soft power in the age of AI. Based on forensic analysis of China’s 15th Five-Year Plan (for 2026 to 2030) and current fiscal trajectories, Beijing is re-architecting its operations into a capital-intensive “Cognitive Domain” war machine. 

Aggregate annual spending on foreign influence is projected to exceed $10 billion this year. This figure includes the United Front Work Department — the Chinese agency tasked with co-opting foreign elites — whose budget alone, adjusted for current fiscal trajectories, is projected to reach $4 billion. To put that figure in stark perspective: Beijing now spends more on influence operations than the entire operating budget of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.  

Even Iran, grappling with hyperinflation exceeding 40 percent, has prioritized this domain. The 2025 budget for the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting was set at approximately $580 million, a 46 percent increase year-over-year. In a country where the economy is crippled, the regime has explicitly chosen to starve civil infrastructure to feed its propaganda machine. 

The billions flowing into these operations are funding a new kind of weapon: industrialized artificial intelligence. This technology has fundamentally altered the economics of influence. In 2016, interference required expensive “troll farms” — buildings full of human operators manually typing posts. Today, generative AI automates that labor, allowing a single adversary to manage thousands of distinct personas that produce unique, convincing content at infinite scale. 

Simultaneously, the barrier to entry has collapsed. What once required the resources of a state intelligence service now requires little more than a commercially available subscription, granting every malign actor the power to flood America’s social media feeds and news with falsehoods. That is why, crucially, efforts to protect our midterm elections must begin now. 

For too long, Washington has operated under a strategic misconception I call the “Super Bowl Fallacy.” Inside the State Department and across the federal government, elections are treated as the “Super Bowl” of malign influence — a scheduled, high-stakes spectacle that begins a few months before voting starts and ends when the networks call the race. Under this mindset, we scramble resources late in the season to “secure the vote,” standing up task forces and surging intelligence capabilities. 

But now more than ever, the information space is a perpetually shifting mosaic, and the true strength of a democracy is forged or fractured in the “quiet years” between elections. It is in these intermediate periods — the “off-season” — during which our adversaries take advantage. They are deepening social fissures, planting harmful narratives and building the AI-enabled bot networks that will be activated well ahead of November’s elections. There is no “push button” solution that can undo years of adversarial conditioning in a single news cycle. 

Gen. Rudd’s pledge is vital, but it is insufficient. As we navigate the weaponization of artificial intelligence and increased adversary budgets for malign influence, both Congress and the White House must pledge to the American public that they will do everything they can to ensure the sovereignty of our elections. 

If we wait until the weeks before the election to confront these influence operations, we will be fighting for voters who have already been targeted, profiled and manipulated by adversaries who began their work years ago. To delay action now is a costly mistake.  

Darjan Vujica served as a senior official at the State Department and was most recently the emerging technology coordinator at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi and director of the Global Engagement Center’s Analytics Directorate.

https://thehill.com/opinion/cybersecurity/5713097-china-russia-iran-influence/