The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency finally got a new nominee for director, with President Donald Trump on Monday nominating Michael LoSapio, chief information security officer at Palantir.

CISA has been without a Senate-confirmed director for the entirety of Trump’s second term, after his first pick, Sean Plankey, languished in the Senate before withdrawing in April.

LoSapio could face some obstacles of his own, with Palantir far from a popular company with the Democrats set to take over Congress. Democrats have scrutinized the company over its work with the Department of Homeland Security, even as Palantir has denied aiding mass surveillance of immigrants.

As of late last month, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., was also still waiting for CISA to release a public version of a report on telecommunications cybersecurity, and he had placed one of several Senate holds on Plankey pending the receipt of that report.

Republicans will still control the Senate until January, however, and a lame-duck session began Monday.

Some CISA watchers were convinced that the agency’s acting director, Nick Andersen, was likely to continue holding the role. He was running out of days to hold the “acting” position under the law, but putting forward a nominee could pause the clock on that deadline.

The administration was thought to be looking for someone from a high-profile tech company to fill the CISA director position, a bill LoSapio fits.

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Democrats’ big win on Election Day, which saw them take control of both the House and Senate, has ramifications for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, artificial intelligence, surveillance policy and much more.

Here’s what lawmakers and cybersecurity experts have to say about the short-term and long-term prospects on Capitol Hill.

Leadership plans ahead

Maggie Hassan, D-N.H. is in line to take the gavel on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, with Sen. Gary Peters, Mich., retiring.

“Our government’s number one job is to keep people safe, and the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee must work to ensure that our country remains safe, secure and free from all kinds of threats,” Hassan said in a statement to CyberScoop. “That work involves protecting against terrorism and fentanyl trafficking, but it also includes guarding against emerging threats like artificial intelligence security risks and strengthening our cybersecurity.”

“The Trump-Vance administration has undermined our security on these fronts, including by diverting resources away from combatting fentanyl trafficking and gutting CISA,” she continued. “We need to reverse these cuts, confront these challenges and put public safety first.”

Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., is poised to return once again as chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, said Democrats are taking over at a “pivotal time for CISA,” with it looking to add staff after cutting back by nearly one-third.

“First and foremost, we will aim to work with CISA to expedite its critical re-staffing effort and to ensure it has the expertise necessary to support stakeholders as they defend against the scale and velocity of AI-enabled cyber-attacks,” he said in a statement to CyberScoop. “Advances in AI can help defenders, but it will also accelerate the consequences of deferred investments in security and CISA must be well-positioned to help critical infrastructure owners and operators rapidly improve their cybersecurity posture.”

“We will prioritize getting resources straight into the hands for defenders — by extending the State and Local Cybersecurity Grant Program and improving support of under-resourced sectors, especially water,” he continued. “We will work to ensure CISA re-establishes its cross-sector coordination capacity, which was diminished when the Trump administration- terminated CIPAC, by making sure the Anchor-CI is eventually up and running and meets the needs of stakeholders. Finally, we will make sure CISA is well-positioned to support the secure development and deployment of AI.”

What happens in the lame-duck session

Before the GOP relinquishes control of the House and Senate to Democrats, though, there’s a lame-duck session ahead. 

Long-term renewal of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 (CISA 2015) is a bipartisan and industry priority, with it set to expire Dec. 11. Current Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Rand Paul, R-Ky., has been the biggest obstacle to reauthorization, but he could get “rolled” by GOP leadership on an extension, said Michael Garcia, a former government cyber official and vice president of the cybersecurity practice at Monument Advocacy. Possible vehicles for CISA 2015 to hitch a ride include an omnibus funding bill or the annual defense policy bill.

The Department of Homeland Security, and its subagency CISA, are currently operating on a continuing resolution that’s also set to expire Dec. 11, where lawmakers could temporarily extend CISA 2015 if a long-term solution can’t be reached in the lame duck. Another continuing resolution before Dec. 11 in lieu of an omnibus spending bill is an option for the lame duck. Both a CR and omnibus spending bill would theoretically include DHS funding, although the agency’s funding has been made more difficult in the past by the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement within the department.

Republicans have talked about wanting to get the fiscal 2027 National Defense Authorization Act done in the lame duck. Besides the possibilities of CISA 2015 being included in the bill, Nicholas Leiserson, senior vice president for policy at the Institute for Security and Technology, said the Senate version of the legislation has a pair of very noteworthy cyber provisions: a “very broad” authorization for contractor-owned, contractor-operated offensive cyber operations, and a requirement that every artificial intelligence product sold to the Defense Department have an AI bill of materials.   

Additional leadership shuffle

While Paul is losing his gavel, he’s shown he can be a disruptive force on passing cybersecurity legislation through the Senate in the minority. That makes what he does next possibly determinative for cyber bills, Leiserson and Garcia said. “If he leaves HSGAC, let a thousand cyber bills flourish!” Garia quipped on social media. Paul could opt to become the top Republican on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee instead of HSGAC.

Nebraska Sen. James Lankford would take over for Paul as top HSGAC Republican in that scenario, and an industry source said he’s viewed as a supporter of CISA 2015.

On Senate Intelligence, the panel’s leadership goes to a lawmaker who has placed a big emphasis on cybersecurity in his congressional career: Mark Warner, D-Va. 

On the House side, while Rep. Andrew Garbarino, R-N.Y., moves to the minority on the Homeland Security panel, he has proven willing to collaborate with Democrats on cybersecurity issues. Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., is poised to take the gavel of the panel’s cybersecurity subcommittee, and Rep. Vince Fong, R-of California looks set to become the subcommittee’s top Republican and has his own history of bipartisanship. Fong would replace current subcommittee chair Andy Ogles, the far-right Tennessee Republican who lost in the primaries.

One thing to watch in the House, Leiserson said, is how the House looks to tackle AI — through existing committees, a select committee or some other structure. Democrats haven’t put forward a unified front on AI guardrails yet.

With AI models uncovering as many vulnerabilities as they are, “highly capable frontier models are going to drive a lot of discussion” about AI and cybersecurity, said Craig Albright, the Business Software Alliance’s senior vice president for U.S. government relations.

Appropriations, oversight, legislation

If the NDAA or a CISA 2015 extension don’t pass in the lame duck, they’d be priorities in 2027, too.

“CISA 2015 has to happen, and if we can’t get it done, then we can’t move to the next thing,”  said Henry Young, BSA’s policy director. “Once we get it done, there’s an open question about which of these priorities that we’ve talked about gets to be number one. Is it post-quantum cryptography? Is it government IT modernization? Is it frontier AI cybersecurity systems? We don’t know that yet, and we can’t know until we pass this law.”

How damaged the agency CISA is by Trump administration’s budget cuts is something Democrats are expected to scrutinize closely. Another top budget issue is what to do with the expired State and Local Cybersecurity Grants Program housed at DHS, since even if it’s reauthorized, it will require appropriators taking steps to invest in it.

Democrats could take a look at a variety of other Trump administration changes at DHS and CISA, on topics like election security, the Cyber Safety Review Board, the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative and more. 

More broadly, Leiserson said an area of Democratic cyber oversight is likely to be the Department of Government Efficiency that cut cyber personnel at agencies at and beyond CISA, and “particularly the integrity of systems that DOGE touched when they were given very high privileged access to federal systems.”

If the White House puts forward a permanent nominee for director of CISA, Democrats would be poised to vet that person. They also would have a say in who leads the Office of the National Cyber Director, should the incumbent, Sean Cairncross, depart.

So far, Democrats haven’t put forward a unified posture on expired surveillance authorities known as Section 702, although both Warner and incoming House Intelligence Chairman Jim Himes, D-Conn., have fought in the past for its renewal. The surveillance program is operating similarly still due to a court order, but that order only lasts through next spring.

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The clock is running out on Nick Andersen’s time to serve as acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, but there appear to be efforts afoot to keep him in the role for longer, with no permanent nominee in sight.

There’s broad support for the idea of Andersen retaining the position one way or another, which he’s held since February of this year. Since then, Sean Plankey withdrew his nomination for the Senate-confirmed position in April, and in June, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said a likely replacement nominee had met with the president and was coming soon. Four months later, no nominee has materialized.

“We proudly support the work Acting CISA Director Nick Andersen has done in his role,” a DHS spokesperson said in response to questions about keeping Andersen on board and what became of that potential nominee. DHS referred CyberScoop to the White House for any further comment, but the White House didn’t respond to inquiries.

The easiest way to keep Andersen in the acting role would be to select a nominee, thus pausing his 210-day limit on serving as acting director, said Mark Montgomery, senior director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank’s Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation.

But “my gut reaction is that there’s just no appetite at the White House to say the four-letter ‘CISA’ to the president,” given his past animosity toward the agency, Montgomery said. “The way to keep Andersen in play is to nominate somebody. I think that stops the clock. But I don’t even think they can get the president to nominate Bugs Bunny. To me, that’s troubling.”  

Other top agency positions have received Senate confirmation under Mullin, Montgomery observed.

Multiple sources told CyberScoop they’ve been told that the administration has been working to keep Andersen in the job, possibly by shifting his title to “senior official performing the duties of” CISA director.

Some would like to see Andersen receive the job full-time, but sources say that when the search to replace Plankey began, the administration was looking for someone with a high pre-existing profile, such as a role at a big-name tech company.

On Capitol Hill, the leaders of the House Homeland Security Committee offered at least some  degree of support for Andersen.

“Acting Director Andersen is doing an excellent job preparing CISA to meet today’s threats, and we have a great working relationship. He has shown exceptional leadership at the agency, which is especially important in an increasingly complex threat environment as adversaries and criminals use AI to expand their capabilities and make attacks on our networks and critical infrastructure harder to defend against,” said Chairman Andrew Garbarino, R-N.Y. “I appreciate our partnership and would gladly support his nomination.”

“Acting Director Andersen has provided some much-needed stability to CISA following a year of chaos and incompetent leadership,” said the panel’s top Democrat, Bennie Thompson of Mississippi. “While we may have our differences, I appreciate his dedication to the mission: securing government networks and the critical infrastructure ordinary Americans rely on every day. I am also concerned that any unnecessary changes to CISA’s leadership could once again destabilize CISA, which would make America less safe. It is in the best interest of CISA’s mission to have an empowered leader who has earned the trust of the agency’s workforce and its stakeholders.”

One industry source also said Andersen was a popular leader.

“Frankly, from everything [I’ve heard], people broadly support Nick, and he’s doing well at CISA,” the source said. “I don’t get the sense that anyone in the White House wants to make the effort to nominate a CISA director, which is a missed opportunity. With limited time remaining in this Congress, the administration would be wise to push his nomination through the Senate and put Nick on firmer footing.”

Andersen has made a tangible difference at an agency that has seen dramatic budget and personnel cuts, said John Zangardi, a former chief information officer at DHS.

“The organization is actually getting much better under Nick,” said Zangardi, chair of the Northern Virginia Technology Council Cyber Summit and Cyber50 Awards. “Like if you were there a year ago, it was pretty stark. … So morale has kind of gone back up, and I think Nick has been very instrumental in that. And I think he’s important in keeping that continuity going.”

One of the notions of having a Senate-confirmed nominee is for the prospective leader to be well-vetted by an outside body. On the other hand, it can also lead to nominees being stalled as senators press other agendas, something that Plankey ran into on multiple occasions.

But having a Senate-confirmed nominee at the agency also helps CISA compete for its priorities within the interagency process and at the White House, Montgomery said. Absent that, keeping Andersen in the position in some capacity is the next-best option, he said.

Montgomery also said Andersen has been making longer-term plans at the agency. Most recently, it released a strategy meant to carry CISA through 2030.

Andersen “strikes me as someone who knows he’s got more than a month left in his job,” Montgomery said. “He’s thinking hard about it, and he’s starting to think three to six months out, which is a lot for this administration.”

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A group of leading House Democrats introduced legislation Monday requiring the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to conduct an assessment of its workforce to determine whether it’s up to the task after the exit of around 1,000 employees during President Donald Trump’s second term.

The concept of a force structure assessment is more common in military branches, including one that Congress previously ordered for Cyber Command. The CISA Force Structure Assessment Act would order the agency to carry out a review of whether the agency still has the necessary personnel, training and certifications after budget cuts and other Trump-era departures.

“America’s cyber defenses are only as strong as the people behind them,” Rep. James Walkinshaw, the Virginia Democrat serving as lead sponsor of the bill, said in a news release. “As cyber threats grow more sophisticated and technologies like artificial intelligence and quantum computing reshape the threat landscape, Congress needs a clear accounting of whether CISA has the workforce, skills, and resources required to keep Americans safe and enable mission delivery. This legislation will identify critical gaps and give Congress concrete information to address them.”

Also sponsoring the bill are the top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, and the top Democrat on its cybersecurity subcommittee, Delia Ramirez, D-Ill.

Additional elements of the force structure assessmewould include a review of the security of federal IT systems and support for state and local governments; the risks posed by AI, quantum computing and other cutting edge technologies; CISA’s threat-hunting and incident response capabilities; support for critical infrastructure and operating technology, including CISA’s role as a sector risk management agency for a number of industry sectors; the operation of the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative; and international cooperation.

Some lawmakers and other observers have worried those areas have been greatly impacted by staffing cuts, ultimately hurting CISA’s ability to carry out its core functions.

Ramirez dinged GOP lawmakers for “a lack of interest in safeguarding our nation’s cybersecurity and our residents’ civil rights and privacy” in going along with the CISA cuts and other developments at the Department of Homeland Security.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have voiced concern about the scope of cuts at CISA, but Republicans have approved some of them while pushing back on others. CISA itself is currently seeking to hire hundreds of new personnel, even as its latest budget blueprint calls for yet more funding reductions.

“With Iran targeting our critical infrastructure and frontier AI models creating new cyber risks, we must ensure we have a cybersecurity workforce to counter these growing threats,” Thompson said. “After Trump has spent the past two years targeting and slashing CISA’s workforce, we need the agency to assess if it has [the] right personnel in place to fulfill its mission.”

National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross has discussed White House plans to develop a cybersecurity academy meant to consolidate and enhance existing federal cyber training and education programs, with the aim of addressing cyber workforce shortages. His office has reportedly drafted an executive order that would establish that academy.

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AI is getting better at much of what security teams have long spent time on: analyzing information, identifying patterns, and providing technically sound recommendations quickly. As those capabilities become more routine, they are changing what security practitioners spend their time on.

Reaching a technically sound recommendation is also getting easier, which puts more weight on the judgment about what to do with it. A recommendation can make complete sense from a security perspective and still carry consequences for the systems, people and business around it that change what the right decision is.

Experienced practitioners bring context an AI system usually lacks: how systems are actually used, which parts of the business depend on them, what happened during previous incidents, and what an action is likely to set off. That context often changes what a team decides to do next.

This matters for security leaders as they hand AI a larger role in operations. They are the ones deciding where it can act with more freedom and where human judgment stays in the loop. Some of the hardest calls start with analysis that is technically sound, because the information available to the AI may not include enough context about that particular environment.

Security teams face this daily. For example, a critical vulnerability with a public exploit may need to be patched immediately. But if it affects a line controller or a medical device running under vendor certification, an unscheduled reboot could stop production or create a regulatory issue. The environment determines how and when the team should respond.

The same applies to suspicious infrastructure. An IP address tied to malicious activity may also belong to shared cloud infrastructure or a content delivery network that business services depend on, and blocking it would take those services down with it.

Context changes the decision

Experienced practitioners know things about their environments that never made it into an asset inventory, a runbook, or any dataset AI can reach. They know the unimportant server still supports a critical business process. They remember that isolating one network segment during a previous incident took down another service. They can also tell that activity which looks hostile is really an authorized red team, a security test, or scheduled vendor work.

In one case, for instance, a service account showed authentication activity far above its baseline, baseline was connecting from an unfamiliar host at 3 a.m. The recommendation was to disable it pending investigation. An experienced analyst checked the account’s activity and noticed the same spike, host and timing four times a year, during the quarterly close. The activity was statistically unusual and completely normal for that particular business process. Disabling the account would have stopped financial settlement mid-run and cost the team days of manual reconciliation.

This is one of the decisions CISOs now face as they expand AI’s role. How much autonomy to grant a system should not rest mainly on model confidence or threat severity, since neither tells you what happens once the recommended action is taken. Reversibility and blast radius are the better test, and they need to be assessed separately. Isolating a domain controller is reversible by reconnecting it and doing it at the wrong moment can cause an organization-wide outage.

Low-impact, reversible actions are better candidates for greater autonomy, with safeguards in place. More scrutiny makes sense when actions are difficult to reverse. They have a broad potential impact, cross legal or trust boundaries, affect systems beyond the evidence available, or reduce the organization’s ability to investigate what happened.

AI models and their capabilities will keep changing. Security leaders still need to understand the potential impact of the actions they allow them to take.

Look at what people actually do

AI can leave an analyst with dozens of recommendations to review in the time they once spent investigating a handful of cases. Each analyst now has more decisions to make. Organizations need to measure what happens to those decisions.

The KPI you choose determines the behavior you get. Make automation rate the focus, people have an incentive to approve more. Make mean time to resolution the focus and people close cases faster. Neither measures whether the decisions improved. A 90 percent automation rate tells a CISO very little on its own. What matters is what happened in the 10 percent of cases where someone stepped in.

Leaders should look at what happens when a recommendation reaches a person. Whether the analyst approves, edits, or rejects it can tell you more than the automation rate alone. The time spent on the review matters too, along with whether the analyst’s intervention changed the outcome.

AI recommendations can be harder to review because they may arrive already looking well supported. The explanation is fluent, uses the right terminology, and points to evidence that looks credible, even when it does not fully support the conclusion. The signals experienced practitioners relied on to spot weak analysis can become much harder to see.

Under-reliance deserves attention, too. An analyst who second-guesses correct recommendations without adding anything reduces the efficiency AI was meant to provide. Approval latency is a useful signal here. A long queue of recommendations approved almost instantly, especially when people are under pressure, should prompt leaders to check how much review is actually happening.

AI recommendations can be harder to review because they can look convincing. They may use the right language and point to real evidence. The reviewer still needs to check whether the evidence actually supports the recommendation.

For CISOs expanding AI in security operations, a human approval step in front of every automated action is not enough. Leaders need to know what happened during the review, not just that someone approved the recommendation.

Build autonomy policies around reversibility and blast radius. Track what people actually do with AI recommendations, and test whether oversight works by deliberately introducing known-wrong recommendations into controlled workflows.

False negatives need particular attention. A false positive generates something the team can investigate. A confident false negative generates nothing, and the absence of a finding can feel reassuring. An AI-generated all-clear should be treated as a claim requiring evidence, particularly when the consequences of missing something are significant.

As AI takes on more of the initial analysis, practitioners will face more decisions that require context and experience. Security leaders need to make sure that judgment remains part of how their teams work. Getting to a technically sound recommendation faster only helps if the action that follows makes sense for the environment.

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Colorado police arrested a man last week over charges that he impersonated both Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and head of the National Security Agency’s famed Tailored Access Operations hacking unit.

Joshua Culver, also known as “Maverick Young,” appeared in a Colorado court Tuesday after his arrest stemming from an indictment in Indiana in July on four counts of falsely impersonating an officer of the court and one count of using a forged signature of a judge.

Culver allegedly pretended to be an officer of the NSA in September of last year and said in that capacity he “could take adverse action” against the Tippecanoe County sheriff’s office in Lafayette, Ind. if it didn’t provide him information he sought, including the location of his biological daughter.

He also allegedly pretended to be an NSA officer again that month, then produced a document purportedly from the head of the Tailored Access Operations (TAO) elite hacking unit in February to the Clerk of the Lake County, Ind. Superior Court.

“The document, which purported to bear official letterhead, falsely stated that it was a directive issued by the ‘Director of TAO’ and that Culver was a ‘federal asset’ active in multiple investigations,” the indictment reads. “The document commanded that certain actions be taken as required by ‘federal directive,’ including that the case pending against Culver be dismissed with prejudice, that warrants be quashed, and that Lake County officials cooperate with a ‘federal audit’ of individuals identified in the document.”

TAO has gone by the name of Office of Computer Network Operations since 2017, although in July it indicated that it was resuming its old name. TAO garnered unflattering attention in 2017 after the global WannaCry ransomware outbreak used an exploit that the NSA developed.

The indictment also alleges that Culver used a forged signature of Roberts in September for an “Order of Dismissal With Prejudice” in a case against Culver in Grant County, Indiana.

A defender appointed to Culver did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

You can read the indictment below.

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With identity protection services for millions of victims of the 2015 Office of Personnel Management breach set to expire, a group of lawmakers is making a push to extend them forever.

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C., introduced legislation to give lifetime identity protection coverage to around 4.2 million federal employees exposed in the historic breach by alleged Chinese hackers, which affected 22.1 million people. Warner said “the threat remains,” necessitating lifetime coverage.

That coverage is due to end at the end of September, as set by a 10-year authorization from Congress. That prompted the pair of lawmakers to introduce Reducing the Effects of the Cyberattack on OPM Victims Enduring Response and Protecting Identifiable Information Act, or  RECOVER PII Act.

“The data stolen included workers’ most sensitive and personal information – from Social Security numbers to security clearance records – and once that information is in the hands of a bad actor, you don’t get it back,” Warner said in a news release Monday. “We have a responsibility to stand by the federal workers who were put at risk through no fault of their own. This legislation will ensure those affected continue to receive the identity protection they need, while helping better safeguard personal information from future exploitation.”

But the bill could have an uphill climb, given the makeup of Congress and stance of the Trump administration.

The Democratic co-sponsors in the Senate are Tim Kaine of Virginia, with Angela Alsobrooks of Chris Van Hollen, both of Maryland. The Democratic House cosponsors are Reps. Don Beyer and James Walkinshaw of Virginia, with Steny Hoyer of Maryland.

Warner and Norton listed no co-sponsors from the GOP, which controls both chambers of Congress and the White House.  And OPM has declared the program too expensive based on the cost relative to the number of claims.

Similar legislation to extend the coverage, including from Norton, has fallen short in recent years.

“Lifetime identity protection is the only solution that will give the workers whose data was compromised the peace of mind they deserve,” Norton said Monday. “Because there is no limit on how long personal information can be exploited, Congress must protect these federal employees and contractors in perpetuity.”

Some watchdog scrutiny of the OPM program has been critical, and while consumer advocates say identity theft protections are helpful, they nonetheless say they aren’t adequate.

The Warner-Norton legislation also would offer reimbursements to federal employees and contractors for privacy services.

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A total of eight cyber personnel have served in a program that began in 2022 to rotate workers between federal agencies to bolster the workforce, a watchdog report said Thursday.

Over the life of the Federal Rotational Cyber Workforce program that effectively went away last year, 13 agencies offered 106 positions and received 634 applications, according to the Government Accountability Office. Eight workers won approval to participate.

The goal of the Office of Personnel Management-led program, established by bipartisan legislation, was that “participating employees develop knowledge and skills that they can bring back to their home agencies,” as the GAO noted.

A couple major factors account for the low participation, the study found. One was the sharp decline in eligible advertised positions: 75 in 2023, 31 in 2024 and none in 2025 or 2026.

As of December of last year, OPM said it planned to advertise positions on Connect.gov, but this year OPM said it didn’t do so and wouldn’t be advertising positions due to “budgetary constraints,” according to the report.

“OPM officials stated that they do not anticipate any agencies offering positions in 2026, and that OPM does not intend to invest resources in advertising and managing the program going forward,” the report reads. “As a result, OPM officials stated that the agency does not intend to post advertised positions in 2026.”

The other major factor was that even though there were 634 applications, OPM said there were issues with many of the applicants, including that they were underqualified, didn’t obtain necessary approval in advance of applying or were contractors who weren’t eligible.

Additionally, “It was often easier for agencies to allow employees to serve cyber rotations within their own agency,” OPM reported.

OPM evaluated possible shortcomings in implementing the program in late 2024 and developed plans for improving it, but never followed up on them, the GAO said. As of next summer the program will officially end, OPM said.

The program isn’t the only one that feds have tried to implement to address the persistent gap in cybersecurity skills and experience. Nor is it the only one to fall on hard times in President Donald Trump’s second term, as the administration slashed budgets at agencies and forced out cyber personnel.

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Trump administration budget chief Russell Vought told lawmakers Tuesday that he’s willing to work with Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin on re-staffing up the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, following deep personnel cuts and further proposed reductions in the fiscal 2027 budget blueprint.

Mullin said last week at a House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security hearing that he would like to hire 600 more people at CISA, similar to remarks he made earlier this month at another House hearing. President Donald Trump has cut or lost more than 1,000 from an agency that stood around 3,400-strong at the end of the Biden administration — cuts criticized by lawmakers in both parties.

At a House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government   hearing Tuesday, Rep. Mark Amodei, R-Nev., asked Vought about Mullin’s CISA remarks.

“You don’t just flip a light switch on, and you got 600 folks over in CISA now. What’s the plan for getting CISA fully operational?” Amodei, who chairs the panel’s Subcommittee on Homeland Security, asked. “How do we make sure we have a robust, effective, cost-effective CISA force? Because I don’t think anybody thinks we have it now.”

Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, said he hasn’t received a formal request from Mullin to increase CISA’s number of full-time employees, but knows that hiring isn’t instantaneous.

“He was not here when we developed this budget, so if he feels the need to have additional resources, we will work through that internally, and at the appropriate time, come up and brief you,” he answered Amodei. “I do think he’s in the process still of getting his arms wrapped around the department,” he said. Mullen became DHS secretary in late March.

“This is probably one of those things, particularly in the cyber world, you now have a year and a half of a new administration,” Vought continued, and referred to conservative complaints about how CISA handled election security and disinformation under Biden. “We saw this agency had major concerns with it in our four years outside of government and with new management, I think it’s now an agency, or could be an agency, that plays a very valuable part for DHS’s portfolio.”

Bringing hundreds of new CISA personnel on board could prove challenging for reasons beyond the usual bureaucratic hurdles and security clearance processes that slow any federal hires in the national security space. Past CISA employees and agency observers have said the way the Trump administration has purged personnel and treated those who have stayed could prove a further disincentive to future hires.

Acting CISA director Nick Andersen recently said that the agency has begun the process of hiring new CISA staffers, and expected to have nearly 200 job offers out by the end of this month.

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