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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The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency wants to fundamentally reevaluate how it prioritizes risks and vulnerabilities, both for privately-owned critical infrastructure and within the federal government, acting director Nick Andersen said Tuesday.

The plans include a binding operational directive for federal agencies set to be published Wednesday and getting more specific with critical infrastructure owners and operators about which assets they need to protect most and how, Andersen said while speaking at an event hosted by Axonius in Washington, D.C. and talking with reporters afterwards.

The binding operational directive looks to revise how federal agencies do vulnerability management, he said. “Overall, our approach to date has been ‘A patch is released, apply this patch as quickly as you can,’” he said.

“We’re really asking people to take more of a focus on risk associated with each vulnerability. Is it with an asset that is internet-exposed? Does it align to a KEV entry?” he said, referring to CISA’s list of known exploited vulnerabilities. “Is it automatable in its exploitation? Really, we need to be able to highlight that some patches just aren’t as important as others, and plugging the holes for some vulnerabilities is simply not as important as others.”

Andersen said he has made setting the right priorities the focus of his tenure.

“We have to be okay with saying there are some systems that are less important than others, there are some elements of critical infrastructure that are less important than others,” he said. “Those things are very easy for us to rationalize [for] physical crises, but we need to start wrapping our minds around how we’re going to do that during cyber crises.”

Andersen said artificial intelligence-enhanced threats have fueled the directive in part, based on “a recognition that we’re a different dynamic environment with the shorter timeline to weaponization and exploitation,” but the discussions on the directive have been going on for months, before the splashy announcements about frontier AI models and the risks they might deepen. Wednesday’s directive is unrelated to the AI-focused executive order released by the Trump administration last week.

The idea of prioritizing certain potential hacking targets over others isn’t a new one in critical infrastructure, with concepts like “Section 9” designations under a 2013 executive order for entities whom an attack upon could have catastrophic effects; “systemically important critical infrastructure” designations, as recommended by the Cyberspace Solarium Commission; or the creation of the National Risk Management Center established during President Donald Trump’s first term but now the subject of proposed budget cuts.

Andersen said past concepts haven’t worked well, citing Section 9 designations as an example.

“We would sit here and say, ‘Congratulations, you’re with this company, and you’re a Section 9 entity, isn’t that fantastic?’” he said. “That’s really not the level of fidelity that we have to be able to get to to have a real measurable conversation about risk. I need to be able to go to a company and say, ‘Here’s the specific function you’re supporting that makes you more critical. Let’s have a conversation about the specific assets that support that function, and how do we get to a measurable level of resilience for those assets?’”

Those discussions need to get down to a “fine grain,” Andersen said.

“If I’ve got a major bank that I’m talking to, is it as important to me that the bank’s process that supports the bulk payment system is resilient, or is it just as important to me that the branch location two blocks away is continuing to operate?” he said. “Those things just are apples and oranges, even though it’s the same entity that might be affected.”

CISA’s capabilities under the Trump administration have drawn considerable scrutiny, given deep budget cuts at the agency, with more planned. The administration is now making moves to hire back personnel.

Andersen said the agency is working to hire 329 people, and will have job offers out to 182 of them by the end of June. He said the emphasis of the first tranche of hires under the hiring sprint is operational capabilities, meaning areas like emergency communications, infrastructure security and regional personnel.

The agency also has had some of its work hampered by the government shutdowns, such as the delay in plans for town-hall meetings about implementation of the Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act of 2022, which will require key owners and operators to report major incidents within 72 hours.

Andersen said he couldn’t set a date for finalization of regulations related to the law — which had already been delayed prior to any funding lapses — with those town halls now scheduled to begin next week.

“We could have a lot of comments that come to us and really radically change our way of thinking about what the need is here,” he said. “But our focus is just on what’s the original congressional intent behind CIRCIA. what is the greatest need that we’re going to be able to serve, and how it’s going to be able to further the mission that we have for the nation.”

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Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told Congress Wednesday that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency would ideally have 2,800 personnel, up from approximately 2,200 now and down from 3,400 before the second Trump administration began.

President Donald Trump has pushed to dramatically reduce personnel numbers at the agency, something that has drawn criticism from both Democrats and Republicans on the Hill. Trump has proposed hundreds of millions more in cuts for fiscal 2027.

House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Andrew Garbarino, R-N.Y., asked Mullin at a hearing Wednesday about further proposed CISA budget cuts, saying he was “concerned” about personnel numbers and funding for education programs and whether the fiscal 2027 blueprint would “negatively impact those efforts.”

Mullin said DHS funding lapses have made the department rethink CISA, although the deep CISA personnel reductions predate the recent spate of government shutdowns. 

“We had to readjust the way we’re looking at CISA and better lean on public partnerships,” he said. The agency can work well with 2,800 people “If we can actually have the partnerships we need with states and be able to use the grants, the monies that [we] saved with CISA to be able to invest with local and state municipalities. … We’re not going to fail on the mission we have in front of us.”

CISA personnel figures are in a constant state of flux. The CISA staff figure of 2,200 Mullin gave is down even from December. In March, acting director Nick Andersen said CISA was looking to hire 300 people.

There’s been no proposal from the Trump administration to-date to take funds formerly allocated to CISA and shift them to state governments for cybersecurity. State officials have said CISA budget cuts have made their jobs harder, and most experts have said the Trump administration’s approach to shift cyber responsibilities to states is badly misguided.

Congress has yet to permanently reauthorize the State and Local Cybersecurity Grant Program that expired last year before it got a temporary extension and is due to expire again in September.

CISA has gone without a Senate-confirmed director for the entirety of the second Trump administration. Mullin said “we’ve got a person soon to be nominated that will be running CISA that has the ability to recruit and focus on the authorities we have.”

Mullin said CISA has “unique” authorities that haven’t “been completely utilized.” 

“We want CISA to be the leader in cybersecurity,” he said. “They should be and they will be.”

A House Appropriations subcommittee is set to consider a DHS funding bill Friday.

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Sean Plankey, most recently the nominee for director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, is joining defense technology company UFORCE as its U.S. chief executive officer.

The London-based company created out of nine Ukrainian-based firms announced Plankey’s move Monday less than a month after he withdrew his nomination amid difficulties overcoming objections from senators who had placed a hold on it.

Plankey’s a cyber veteran of the first Trump administration but also had been serving as senior adviser on the Coast Guard at the Homeland Security Department, retiring from the Coast Guard this year.

UFORCE makes combat drones for air, land and sea and plans to have its first U.S.-made unmanned surface vessels hitting the water by this summer. The startup reportedly brought its valuation to $1 billion earlier this year.

“The United States and its allies are looking for defense technology partners that can move

quickly, innovate continuously and deliver systems already proven across theaters of combat,” Plankey said in a statement. “UFORCE is uniquely positioned to meet that demand and we will do that by manufacturing these capabilities in America.”

Said Oleg Rogynskyy, co-founder and CEO of UFORCE: “Sean’s decision to join UFORCE reflects the strength of our platform and the growing recognition that the future of autonomous defense will be shaped by companies able to combine real combat validation with scalable Western deployment,” 

CISA has gone without a permanent director for the entirety of the second Trump administration, and the president has yet to put forward a nominee for the position since Plankey’s withdrawal last month.

Former Oklahoma senator Markwayne Mullin took over as DHS secretary in late March.

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The Trump administration is redirecting a cybersecurity scholarship program that requires recipients to work in government service toward artificial intelligence, leaving some current program scholars dismayed and bewildered.

In an email to participating school program coordinators obtained by CyberScoop, the Office of Personnel Management and National Science Foundation said the CyberCorps Scholarship For Service program would now be known as CyberAI SFS.

“The SFS students we enroll today will not be employable when they graduate in 2-3 years without significant AI background,” the email reads. “Any SFS student in this new program must be proficient in using AI in cybersecurity or providing security and resilience for AI systems. Therefore, new students in the legacy CyberCorps program must learn to acquire AI expertise to augment their cybersecurity expertise.”

“Effective immediately, new SFS scholars will not be accepted to the Legacy CyberCorps(C) program without a description on how they will develop competencies at the intersection of cybersecurity and AI,” the email continues. “The description of the competency development could include, but are not limited to, formal program of study, experimental learning, research activities, capstone projects, competitions, certifications, and/or no-credit professional development via external providers.”

One current program scholar graduating soon said they were “disappointed” by the change for several reasons. As of earlier this week, the agencies collectively running the program — OPM, NSF and the Department of Homeland Security — hadn’t notified any program participants that any changes were on the horizon.

For another: “I was a little bit surprised that it was coming out as so blatantly disregarding the people that haven’t graduated yet, that everyone in my cohort is already considered ‘legacy,’ and the fact that it said people in the program that I’m currently in will not be employable in the coming years,” they said.

The email leaves scholars uncertain about what will happen as they try to fulfill their side of the agreement, especially since doing so has  already been difficult amid cyber job cutbacks and other concerns about how the program has recently been administered. The scholar told CyberScoop there are around 300 people in this current group.

“I assume it will affect placements,” they said. “I can’t say for sure one way or another, because placements are already so impacted by everything that’s been going on. I don’t know what’s due to lack of AI background and what’s due to everything else.”

Another scholar said it was wrong for OPM “to keep claiming repeatedly that they’re acting in our best interests,” when “we’re left out to dry.” Already, the current group of scholars has been frustrated by their inability to get questions answered.

“If we’re legacy CyberCorps, then how does that address anything?” the scholar asked. “We’re just kind of being shoved into a closet and forgotten about. Now in that email, they were saying that we were going to be unhireable in two years time without all this AI stuff under our belt. But at the same time, almost all of our universities were actively discouraging the use of AI.”

Another part of the email brought welcome news to those scholars: a temporary easing of the program’s requirements, including the 70-20-10 rule that sets targets for jobs in the federal government, state and local governments, and the education sector, as well as the rules for securing an internship.. Even so, scholars say they still haven’t received any direct information about the changes.

A spokesperson for NSF said there have been some misunderstandings about the email to school program coordinators (known as principal investigators), but didn’t address current scholars’ concerns about communication.

“The guidance does not require scholars to possess these competencies upon entry,” said the spokesperson, Michael Englund. “Rather, it requires principal investigators (PIs) to clearly describe how their programs will prepare scholars to develop AI-related competencies by the time they graduate (typically within two to three years). In other words, programs must have a concrete and immediate plan to ensure scholars gain these skills during the course of their studies, not prior to admission.”

A spokesperson for OPM addressed the two biggest concerns of current participants.

“There are no changes to placement requirements,” the spokesperson said. “As noted, NSF’s updates are forward-looking to ensure future cohorts are prepared for evolving workforce needs. NSF has encouraged institutions to use professional development funds to expand AI-related training where needed. At OPM, we are also expanding AI training and have introduced AI ambassadors to support adoption.”

On communication: “Principal investigators (PIs) remain the primary point of contact for scholars, but OPM plans to increase direct outreach and plans to issue follow-up communication to scholars on placement efforts,” the spokesperson said.

Last week’s email is the latest turn for the program, with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency last month declaring that it was canceling summer internships due to the lapse in funding for some DHS agencies. Congress has since provided funding for CISA. 

The agency didn’t answer a question about whether that cancellation decision has been reversed as a result.

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