SAN FRANCISCO — Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Tuesday that her cuts to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, plus other yet-to-be-announced reforms, will eventually strengthen the nation’s lead cyber defense organization.
“I know the press has covered the role of Homeland Security and what we have done in CISA — as far as some of the reforms and efficiencies and some of the initiatives and task forces and advisory councils that were changing — as a bad thing,” she said in a speech at the RSAC Conference here, adding she would “encourage” the cyber community to “just wait” to “see what we’re able to do, that there are reforms going on that’s going to be much more responsive.”
Cyber experts and former officials have widely criticized the Trump administration’s efforts to shrink the agency’s workforce, dissolve working groups such as the Critical Infrastructure Partnership Advisory Council and the Cyber Safety Review Board, and shut down cybersecurity tools.
“Instead of just talking about cybersecurity, we’re going to do it,” she said, adding that her staff are conducting a broad reassessment of the office with the aim of getting it back on mission and away from work focused on countering false information online.
CISA has long been targeted by President Trump and other members of the GOP for its efforts to fight mis- and disinformation posted about the 2020 election, COVID-19, and other flashpoint issues on social media. Earlier this month, Trump ordered an investigation into Chris Krebs, who as CISA director in the first Trump administration rebutted baseless claims that the 2020 election was rigged against the president.
Legal challenges, raised in 2023, argued that the government’s role in flagging posts deemed misleading or false resulted in the suppression of politically conservative viewpoints. That viewpoint has prevailed in Trump’s second term, where Noem has vowed to curtail the size and scope of CISA.
More cyber-focused priorities will be outlined in the coming days in Trump’s federal budget proposals, Noem said. Around $10 million has already been “saved” from activities cut within the cyber agency, she noted.
She also told the conference audience that DHS will demand more secure products that have baseline security baked into them by default, in a nod to CISA’s Secure by Design initiative. How that plays out is not entirely clear, as two senior CISA advisors who helped lead Secure by Design resigned last week.
Hundreds of staff at CISA were notified recently that the agency discontinued one cybersecurity threat hunting tool and is preparing to retire another, Nextgov/FCW reported earlier this month. In February, CISA employees focused on countering disinformation, misinformation, and related influence operations were recently put on administrative leave.
The cybersecurity industry was also sent into a tailspin in April after an internal memo from MITRE leaked on social media indicating that CISA would no longer support its flagship CVE Program, used worldwide to track and catalog cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Hours later, CISA reversed course and extended the contract by about 11 months.
“I would ask all of you to not just think about what we haven’t done well in the past, but give us a vision for ways that you think that we can be much more efficient and accountable to the people in this country,” she told the audience.
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