The Top Cybersecurity Agency in the US Is Bracing for Donald Trump

Donald Trump helped create the US government’s cybersecurity agency during his first term as president. Six years later, employees of that agency are afraid of what he’ll do with it once he retakes office.

Trump’s alliances with libertarian-minded billionaires like Elon Musk and his promises to cut government spending and corporate oversight have alarmed staffers at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the component of the Department of Homeland Security that defends US government computer systems from hackers and helps state and local governments, private companies, and nonprofit groups protect themselves.

CISA, which the Trump administration and Congress created in 2018 by reorganizing an existing DHS wing, became a target of right-wing vitriol after its Trump-appointed director rebuffed the president’s election conspiracy theories in 2020 (prompting Trump to fire him) and after it worked with tech companies to combat online misinformation during the 2022 election.

The incidents turned a once-obscure agency with bipartisan credibility into a conservative bogeyman. House Republicans have accused CISA of spying on and censoring Americans, and the GOP senator who will soon oversee the agency wants to eliminate it.

Now, with Trump returning to office vowing to purge disloyal civil servants and turn DHS into an immigration-crackdown machine, CISA employees are acutely worried about the fate of their still-fledgling agency, according to interviews with four current staffers and another US cyber official, all of whom requested anonymity to speak candidly about a sensitive subject.

“We believe it's our responsibility to help those who don't really have the ability to help themselves,” says one CISA employee. “We take our missions seriously, which is why we are all concerned, to a T, about if any decisions are going to affect our mission negatively.”

Scaling Back Corporate Accountability

CISA is bracing for change in several areas that were key to US president Joe Biden’s cybersecurity agenda.

Biden’s cyber strategy called for companies to take more responsibility for the security of their products and services, and CISA led that effort with its campaign encouraging companies to make their systems “secure by design” and “secure by default.” Agency officials pushed tech firms to make security features free and automatic and to pay closer attention to the quality of their code. Hundreds of companies have signed CISA’s secure-by-design pledge and vowed to take cybersecurity more seriously.

CISA employees and Biden administration officials expect the Trump team to kill Biden’s corporate responsibility initiatives. “They do not think it's the role of the US government to make [the] private sector act in a certain way,” says a US cyber official.