Federal Chief Information Officer Greg Barbaccia said Tuesday the government is approaching Anthropic’s Mythos model with measured expectations, acknowledging both its potential to strengthen federal cyber defenses and the significant uncertainties that remain about how it would perform in real-world conditions.

Barbaccia said his direct exposure to Mythos has been limited to evaluations and benchmarking tests, and that no federal agencies have deployed it yet. While he says the Office of the National Cyber Director is coordinating the government’s approach, his broader assessment of where AI-assisted cybersecurity is heading was direct.

“We’re going to get to a world soon where AI defense will be able to catch up,” Barbaccia told CyberScoop on Tuesday at the Workday Federal Forum, produced by Scoop News Group. “We must get to a point where the bots are finding the bots.”

Earlier this month, Barbaccia sent an email to cabinet agencies to inform them that the Office of Management and Budget has started laying the groundwork for a controlled rollout of the model to federal agencies.

His framing reflects a view that the same capabilities making Mythos a potential offensive threat are precisely what make it valuable as a defensive tool. Anthropic has said the model identified thousands of previously unknown, high-severity vulnerabilities across major operating systems and web browsers during testing, many of them decades old. The question for federal security teams is not whether those capabilities are real, but whether they translate from controlled laboratory settings to the complex, defended networks that government agencies actually run.

Barbaccia was candid about that gap. 

“I think it’ll uplevel people and make a novice cybersecurity offensive operator more efficient,” he told CyberScoop. “But the jury is still out on how effective it’ll be against real-world conditions, meaning a network that’s guarded by human defenders that has alerting and things like that. The evaluations I’ve seen have been laboratory learnings.”

That distinction matters for federal security teams weighing how to think about the model. Finding a vulnerability and successfully exploiting it in a defended environment are different problems. Barbaccia pointed to the CVE catalog, the government’s running list of known software flaws, as one area where the model’s speed could have practical value. A human analyst working through that catalog would take considerable time. A model like Mythos could move through it far faster. But speed alone does not determine whether a vulnerability poses an actual threat.

“There’s a difference between something that is exploitable in a 4-nanosecond window during a BIOS boot versus what’s the reality of that being exploited in the real world,” he said. “We have to understand, just like you could secure your entire threat surface, where are the crown jewels? And how do you protect something, and make sure the protection you’re deploying is worthwhile what you’re protecting.”

That kind of thinking is familiar to federal network defenders, who operate under resource constraints and must triage which vulnerabilities to address first. What Mythos potentially changes is the speed at which that triage can happen, and the depth at which vulnerabilities can be identified before an adversary finds them.

Barbaccia said the CIO Council, which coordinates technology policy across civilian agencies, is still in the early stages of understanding what the model could mean for enterprise security environments. “Everybody’s just curious to learn a lot more,” he said.

Agencies have tried on their own to obtain access to Anthropic’s model. The Department of the Treasury has asked for access, according to reports. CISA, the agency responsible for securing, monitoring, and defending civilian agency networks, has not been granted access.

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The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has informed participants of the federal government’s Scholarship for Service program that it has canceled this year’s summer internship programs due to the current funding issues at the Department of Homeland Security. 

Emails from CISA obtained by CyberScoop recently informed applicants that the agency will not bring any CyberCorps: Scholarship for Service interns onboard this summer due to the impacts of the federal funding lapse and the current administrative situation at DHS. For some applicants, agency representatives acknowledged that the cancellations represent a second consecutive year of disrupted placement efforts.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) leads and manages the program, in coordination with the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and DHS. The program covers tuition and provides stipends for students specializing in cybersecurity and artificial intelligence. In exchange, graduates must complete an internship and subsequently work in federal service for a period equal to the duration of their scholarship. 

An OPM official told CyberScoop the agency is “actively in contact with all Federal cabinet agencies on this topic, and are confident that we will place nearly all eligible Scholarship for Service participants within the next couple months.”

An NSF spokesperson declined to comment.  CISA did not respond to CyberScoop’s request for comment. 

The sudden closure of agency pipelines highlights how federal job seekers are currently navigating a paralyzed hiring environment, exacerbated by budget turmoil at DHS and proposed workforce reductions under the Trump administration. The White House’s fiscal 2027 budget would slash CISA’s budget by $707 million, according to a summary released earlier this month, which would deeply chop down an agency that already took a big hit in President Donald Trump’s first year.

Sources told CyberScoop Tuesday that CISA has been reaching out to internship applicants who had participated in a virtual job fair held in February, where they were told that the agency would have 100 internship roles available. However, applicants were warned that the agency would not be able to hire anyone until the agency was funded. 

Program participants expressed regret to CyberScoop last November over taking part in an initiative that binds them to an employer currently unable to hire them. Program administrators have reportedly advised students to get creative in their job searches, a directive that caused frustration among participants who rely on standard federal placement pipelines.

In response to the growing backlog of unplaced graduates, OPM announced plans to collaborate with the National Science Foundation on a mass deferment. OPM Director Scott Kupor stated that the deferment will be implemented after the government shutdown resolves, providing graduates additional time to secure qualifying positions.

The structural breakdown of the CyberCorps pipeline presents long-term challenges for the federal government’s ability to recruit technical talent. The United States currently faces an estimated 500,000 open cybersecurity positions. The scholarship program was historically viewed as a reliable mechanism to bypass private-sector wage competition and secure early-career talent for the federal government.

Lawmakers are currently battling over bills that would end the DHS shutdown. 

Tim Starks contributed to this story. 

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President Donald Trump’s fiscal 2027 budget would slash the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s total by $707 million, according to a summary released Friday, which would deeply chop down an agency that already took a big hit in Trump’s first year.

Another budget document suggests a smaller — but still substantial — hit of $361 million, with the discrepancy possibly due to the comparison points amid budget uncertainty for CISA’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security. DHS and CISA did not immediately respond to a request for clarification.

“At the time the Budget was prepared, the 2026 appropriations bill for the Department of Homeland Security was not enacted, and funding provided by the last continuing resolution it had been operating under (Continuing Appropriations Act, 2026, division A of Public Law 119-37, as amended by division H of Public Law 119-75) had lapsed,” the budget summary notes. “References to 2026 spending in the text and tables for programs and activities normally provided for in the full-year appropriations bill reflect the annualized level provided by the last continuing resolution.”

By either measurement, the proposed budget would cut deeply into an agency that started the Trump administration at roughly $3 billion, and would be substantially below that if Congress enacts the latest blueprint. The budget appendix says CISA would end up with slightly more than $2 billion in discretionary funding under Trump’s plan. For fiscal 2026, appropriators sought to mitigate some of Trump’s proposed CISA reductions.

The 2027 budget summary recycles identical language from the 2026 budget summary, and makes references to ending programs that CISA has already shuttered.

“The Budget refocuses CISA on its core mission — Federal network defense and enhancing the security and resilience of critical infrastructure — while eliminating weaponization and waste,” the summary states in both the 2026 and 2027 documents.

It makes references to getting rid of things that have already been cut, like “external engagement offices such as council management, stakeholder engagement, and international affairs.” It talks about ending programs focused on censorship, something CISA under the Biden administration said it never had, and on “so-called” misinformation, which CISA said it ended during the former president’s term.

Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, the top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, criticized the budget proposal for CISA.

“Like the President’s cyber strategy, the President’s CISA budget reflects his utter lack of understanding of the urgency of the cyber threats we face and how to mobilize the government to help confront them,” he said in a statement to CyberScoop. “As of 2023, CISA was spending $2 million on countering information operations, an effort initially launched at the behest of Congressional Republicans during the first Trump Administration.

“There is nothing that justifies a reckless $700 million cut to CISA, particularly at a time of heightened tensions with Iran and an increasingly aggressive China,” he continued. “I am committed to working with my colleagues to push back against these cuts and ensure we can protect government and critical infrastructure networks.”

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Washington has rediscovered consequences. Just not consistently.

The March 6 executive order rests on a simple, correct idea: cyber-enabled fraud persists because it is profitable, scalable, and too often tolerated. So the government’s answer is to raise the cost. More coordination. More disruption. More prosecutions. More diplomatic pressure on the states that shelter these operations.

Good.

But weeks ago, an OMB Memo rescinded earlier federal software supply chain memos issued during the Biden administration. In practice, that pulled back from the prior attestation-centered model and made tools like the Secure Software Development Attestation Form and SBOM requests optional rather than durable expectations.

Put plainly, we are getting tougher on the people exploiting digital systems while getting softer on the conditions that make those systems so easy to exploit.

The executive order gets something important right. Cyber-enabled fraud is not a collection of random online annoyances. It is an industrialized form of predation: ransomware, phishing, impersonation, sextortion, and financial fraud that’s run as repeatable business models, often transnational and sometimes protected by permissive states. The order responds with a more centralized federal posture built around disruption, coordination, intelligence sharing, prosecution, resilience, and international pressure.

That is directionally correct. Criminal ecosystems do not retreat because we publish better guidance. They retreat when the cost of doing business rises.

But then we arrive at software.

The critique of the old federal assurance regime is not entirely wrong. Compliance can become theater. Bureaucracies are very good at turning legitimate security goals into rituals of form collection and checkbox management. Some skepticism was warranted. OMB says as much explicitly, arguing the prior model became burdensome and prioritized compliance over genuine security investment.

Still, the failure of bad compliance is not proof that accountability itself was the problem.

That is where the logic breaks. The administration is clearly willing to believe that criminal actors respond to deterrence. It is willing to use prosecutions, sanctions, visa restrictions, and coordinated pressure downstream. But upstream, where insecure technology shapes the terrain those criminals exploit, the theory suddenly changes. There, we are told to trust discretion. Local judgment. Flexible, risk-based decisions.

Sometimes that is wisdom. Often it is just a more elegant way of saying no one wants a hard requirement.

This is also why my own position has not changed. In a post I wrote in 2024, I argued that the industry did not need softer expectations or another round of polite encouragement. It needed more concrete action and consequences strong enough to change incentives. The problem was never that we were demanding too much accountability. The problem was that insecure software remained too cheap to ship.

That is the deeper issue. Cybercrime at scale does not thrive only because criminals exist. It thrives because the environment rewards them. Weak identity systems, brittle software, sprawling dependency chains, poor visibility, and diffuse accountability all make predation cheaper. The people who ship avoidable risk rarely absorb the full cost of it. Everyone else does.

So these two policy moves, taken together, reveal something uncomfortable. The government seems to believe in consequences for cybercriminals, but not quite in consequences for insecure production. It wants deterrence for the scammer, but discretion for the supplier.

A coherent cyber strategy would do both. It would aggressively disrupt criminal networks and also create meaningful pressure for secure-by-design production and procurement. It would recognize that punishing attackers matters, but so does changing the terrain that keeps making attack profitable.

The administration is right about one thing: cybercrime will not shrink until the costs of predation rise.

The unanswered question is why that logic should stop at the edge of the scam center.

Brian Fox is the co-founder and CTO of Sonatype.

The post If consequences matter, they should apply to vendors, too appeared first on CyberScoop.

“Decimated.” 

“Amateur hour.”

“Pretty much fallen apart.”

“It’s really hard to find something positive to say right now.”

It’s been a little more than one year into the second Trump administration, and there’s a large consensus, if not total unanimity, among those who have worked with and for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency: It has suffered significantly during that time. 

CISA has lost roughly a third of its personnel and shuttered entire divisions. Observers across the political spectrum told CyberScoop for this story that even on its core missions, like coordinating with industry and protecting federal networks, the agency is significantly diminished.

Many sources that spoke with CyberScoop did so under the condition of anonymity, in order to be more candid or avoid retribution. They told CyberScoop that CISA’s biggest problems, and their consequences, include:

• Trump’s ire over the 2020 election results has led to the agency being deprioritized within the administration. Congress has yet to approve the administration’s permanent pick to lead the agency, Sean Plankey, and lawmakers have failed to do other things to strengthen it. 
• CISA’s capabilities have been significantly diminished by the loss of personnel, expertise and programs. 
• In the absence of a permanent leader, Acting Director Madhu Gottumukkala has struggled to lead the agency. “I don’t think anybody would argue he’s doing a great job,” one industry source said.
• Organizations that previously turned to CISA for help now seek alternatives, like industry alliances, outside consultants or government-to-government partnerships.

Where to assign blame varied from source to source. Most criticized both the administration and Congress, though some faulted one more than the other.

Some see bright spots in CISA under the current administration. And while many are pessimistic about the agency’s future, others expressed optimism.

But the first year reviews are not glowing.

“Year one was a tough year for the agency,” said House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Andrew Garbarino, R-N.Y. He noted that a “lot of the best and brightest have left the agency,” though he expressed optimism about Plankey’s ability to turn CISA around. “The amount of cyberattacks that our nation is seeing every day, both on the private side and on the federal government side — you want your best people there fighting against it, and if they’re somewhere else, it definitely leaves us all vulnerable.”

Said Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, the top Democrat on Garbarino’s panel: “It’s tough to have a robust entity when you cut the money…we are weaker because of CISA’s lack of manpower.”

When priorities shifted

Trump has harbored animosity toward CISA since 2020, when it contradicted his false claims related to widespread electoral fraud. He and his allies built on that animosity, recommending in Project 2025 that the agency be dismantled, divided by its core responsibilities, and farmed out to other federal agencies. 

“There was uniquely a target on its back,” said one CISA official who left in 2025. That hostility came from some Republicans in Congress, especially Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Said Thompson: “CISA wasn’t politicized for the most part, until the Trump administration came along and accused them of somehow contributing to his [election] loss.”

CISA has lost substantial personnel, including veterans and whole teams. Some employees were transferred to other divisions in the Department of Homeland Security. Election security was quickly cut. Two information sharing and analysis centers (ISACs) that serve state and local governments lost funding. A division coordinating with foreign governments, businesses and state and local governments was effectively closed.

The agency has lost senior leaders in programs like counter-ransomware initiatives, threat hunting and secure software development. Contracts for things like detecting threats in critical infrastructure networks, tracking vulnerabilities and collaborating with industry teetered, albeit sometimes only temporarily. 

DHS has unraveled multiple programs in which CISA plays a key role, such as by dismissing members of the Cyber Safety Review Board and disbanding the Critical Infrastructure Partnership Advisory Council. Congress has lurched between letting both a key state and local cyber grant program and a cyber threat information sharing law lapse and temporarily re-upping them.

The departures and program changes likely haven’t ended, either. 

“It’s not a very harmonious place right now,” said one industry source. “I hear from people that are looking to leave.” Former CISA employees say those who remain either believe strongly in the mission, or are simply keeping their heads down until retirement from federal service.

“People I talk to say the morale is really low,” said James Lewis, distinguished fellow with the tech policy program at the Center for European Policy Analysis think tank.

CISA and DHS officials routinely say the changes are designed to get the agency “back on mission.” Lewis, industry officials and others say CISA probably never needed to get involved in combatting misinformation and disinformation, roles that rankled some conservatives, but the agency largely halted that work prior to Trump returning to office.

Some saw duplication and redundancy at CISA as legitimate problems. “I did see overlap between who was actually doing policy and who was actually doing the operational work,” said Ari Schwartz, managing director of cybersecurity services at the law firm Venable and a former Obama administration cybersecurity official.

It was not that long ago when CISA experienced quick budget growth, particularly after its establishment in 2018.

“As with any organization, the first few years are growth years and after a while, the agency needed to reevaluate how it was operating and meeting its statutory authorities,” said Kate DiEmidio, who formerly served as the agency’s director of legislative affairs and acting chief external affairs officer. “There was a need for the agency to refocus.”

Even among those who saw the need for change at CISA, though, many saw the Trump administration as going way too far. “CISA needed surgery,” Lewis said, but “what it needed was surgery with a scalpel, not a sledgehammer.” He added, “Not only is the White House hostile to CISA, but cybersecurity isn’t a priority for them.”

A question of capacity

The cuts have created real-world consequences for cybersecurity coordination. Former officials and industry partners describe broken relationships, unanswered requests for help and serious questions about whether CISA can handle a major crisis. The coordination and engagement that defined the agency’s approach have largely diminished.

The end result is that “they’ve dismantled all of those capabilities in units within government,” said Caitlin Durkovich, a former DHS official in the Obama administration and White House official in the Biden administration. She recently started a firm with former top CISA official Jeff Greene that offers services CISA has scaled back, such as security assessments.

“It’s been really hard to watch,” Greene said, how CISA has been working with the private sector and local governments on “developing a level of trust that is weakening or gone.”

One industry source said they used to meet regularly with top officials, but now can’t get a response. “We’ve got really good engagement elsewhere in government. We really would like the opportunity to do the same thing with CISA,” they said. “Some of the trust that had been built up has been eroded.”

Thompson said the biggest losses have been in election security and secure-by-design, areas where his staff says personnel has been “decimated.”

Said another industry source: “I do feel like that when people, if organizations, want to reach out to CISA, it’s not clear who’s there… If we got into a major conflict, let’s say, with China, and they start triggering Volt Typhoon-related malware, are we organized and ready to roll? I don’t think so.”

Another former CISA official described the current situation as a “lack of capacity,” especially when it comes to coordinating with state and local governments and others on a regional basis.

“A bunch of regions are really grappling with the loss of really key personnel who were the ones that were establishing and maintaining these relationships, and really trying to build the trust between the agency and the private sector, and especially in critical infrastructure,” they said. “Not having as many people to help do that national coordinating function that CISA is supposed to do is a real issue.”

They also said there are fewer people working in “flagship programs” like secure-by-design and developing regulations for the landmark Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act of 2022 (CIRCIA). “People are overstretched,” they said. “They’re not doing all the things that they could or should be doing, or want to be doing, and I think that you see evidence of that with talk from the private sector and their inability to to reach people and to get help “

Schwartz said he worries about when “an incident happens, do they have the people to go in, go to the states, go locally, and really do the work that’s needed, as they did in the past? Because they’ve lost some of that ability.”

Lewis said that “overall, the impression is it’s a much weaker entity than it was a year ago.”

“Their power was in their ability to act as a focal point, to coordinate, to bring people together, and just the publication of vulnerabilities and some of the things they were starting to get into in the previous administration were big steps forward that’s been diminished because they don’t have the people now,” he said. “So a smaller organization, that’s just not going to be as powerful.”

State and local governments say they’ve lost critical connections with CISA, saying they’ve had to turn to one another to fill the gaps.

“We’re asking states to do a job they’re not resourced to do, while weakening the one federal agency designed to help them,” said Errol Weiss, chief security officer at the Health-ISAC. “This is precisely where you do need a strong, centralized federal security function. We already have a national shortage of cybersecurity experts, and you can’t just replicate that expertise 50 times over.”

Overall, Weiss said industry partners have felt the lack of outreach from the agency. “Fewer touchpoints, fewer briefings, fewer problem‑solving calls,” he told CyberScoop, adding that there’s “a growing perception that CISA is being hollowed out where it matters most to industry: stakeholder engagement, collaborative forums, and operational support during incidents.”

Rob Knake, a former top Biden administration official, recently said that “CISA as an organization has pretty much fallen apart.”

Leadership in limbo

One near-universal sentiment is that as Sean Plankey’s leadership nomination drags in the Senate, the agency is worse off.

“We need to start this year off right, and we’re already in February and can’t get Plankey confirmed,” Garbarino said. “There’s nothing better than having a Senate-confirmed person running the show.”

The acting director has also faced criticism beyond the operational issues. Gottumukkala, who served as South Dakota’s chief information officer under Kristi Noem before she became DHS secretary, has faced fire from both parties for his stewardship.

A string of embarrassing stories have emerged about Gottumukkala, from the tale of him failing a polygraph test and seeking to oust those who administered it; to his reported attempted ouster of veteran agency CIO Robert Costello; to his reported uploading of sensitive contract data to ChatGPT. DHS has defended Gottumukkala amid those revelations.

Reading stories like that, “It just sounds like amateur hour,” said one former CISA employee.

“I don’t think he’s up to the task. I believe that he’s not the best person, and I think he is just somebody the secretary likes, because they both are from South Dakota.” Thompson said. “I don’t know anybody before this administration who would be in sensitive areas and not have passed minimal standards like the polygraph.”

The ChatGPT story drew concern from the right by Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, as well as from conservative figure Laura Loomer (the latter of whose remarks were racially tinged). Others were more perturbed by the lie detector story.

“When you have security issues with someone in a leadership position, you should find another place for them to go,” said a former Trump administration national security official. “There are plenty of competent people in DHS, in CISA, who could hold things together until Sean Plankey gets there. There are lots of serious things CISA needs to be working on right now. This is a drag on that. It’s not a place where you want any type of friction at the top.”

Garbarino was more generous, noting Gottumukkala’s technical background. DiEmidio also noted Gottumukkala’s technical skills. But Garbarino and Nevada Rep. Mark Amodei, the GOP chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, have been seeking CISA’s organizational plans to no avail.

“I don’t think he’s intentionally lying to us by saying there’s no reorg plan,” Garbarino said. “But there’s got to be some reasoning behind all these moves, moving the people around, or layoffs or whatever. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt that he is the technical guy that has been given a non-technical job to do.”

Schwartz and some others largely blame Congress for CISA’s current woes, since they haven’t approved Plankey as a full-time, permanent leader. “A lot of the issue is the fact that just doesn’t have the leadership to be able to participate in senior-level discussions,” he said.

What’s left to build on

Despite myriad complaints, many observers still see value in the current iteration of CISA. Some are hopeful about its ability to rebound, too.

CISA says it’s still devoted to its missions. The agency published a 2025 year-in-review about its accomplishments.

“CISA remains steadfast in its mission to safeguard the systems Americans rely on by strengthening federal network defenses, empowering businesses, and fortifying critical infrastructure nationwide,” Gottumukkala said in a statement to CyberScoop.

Moving forward, “we will deepen collaboration with trusted partners, prioritize highly skilled technical professionals, and direct resources for maximum impact—accelerating innovation, operational coordination, and workforce right-sizing to reduce long-term risks while maintaining strong industry partnerships and cost efficiency,” he said. “The CISA leadership and workforce remains committed to this mission despite a small minority who are upset that accountability and reform have come to the agency.”

It’s a message Gottumukkala recently delivered to Congress. “He tried to give the impression that we haven’t lost any capacity,” Thompson said. “I wasn’t impressed.”

Others said CISA is still carrying out many of its old tasks, such as issuing public alerts on vulnerabilities and threats.

“There’s still some good reporting coming out,” Greene said. “But what I can’t know is the volume of what they can put out versus what they used to be able to put out.”

Weiss said “CISA still has tremendous value in areas only the federal government can truly provide: national‑level visibility, cross‑sector coordination and the ability to marshal resources across agencies in a crisis.” But it’s not clear whether CISA can rise to the occasion like it did during the 2024 Change Healthcare crisis.

“All of this means it’s more important than ever for the private sector to take the initiative,” he said. “Critical infrastructure owners and operators cannot assume the federal government will have the capacity to step in the way it once did.”

Weiss and others also said that CISA has refocused on federal networks, but others, such as Lewis, said it’s also diminished there. “That’s their primary mission, and they don’t have the policies or the bodies to do that,” Lewis said.

Garbarino and a number of industry sources say they’re encouraged by the idea that the Trump administration could write less onerous regulations for CIRCIA, with an earlier draft drawing bipartisan and industry criticism.

A Senate-confirmed leader could further brighten the agency’s prospects, many agree. “They still have some good talent there. It’s not totally that we’ve lost everything there,” Schwartz said. “If you have leadership in there, then you can build it up.”

DiEmidio said some of the staff changes have made sense. Election security had more people than other sectors that needed the help, she said. 

“In some ways, I think the external attention to CISA’s mission in the media and with Congress was completely focused on one or two things, and the focus on the things that really matter, and the good work that CISA is doing got overshadowed,” she said. For the agency’s cybersecurity division and other cyber teams, “there were several incidents over the summer where those teams were incredible. They were working evenings, weekends.”

But many agree that rebuilding CISA’s workforce will be difficult.

The Trump administration has deliberately made working for the federal government challenging as a matter of policy. Russell Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget, said before the election that the goal was to put federal workers “in trauma.” Morale at CISA has been particularly bad, they say. Periodic DHS shutdowns haven’t helped.

On the plus side for CISA, it’s a bad labor market, Lewis said.

Some of what CISA needs to do going forward is about managing expectations, said DiEmidio.

“What I would want to make sure is that CISA has a hiring plan in place to start hiring, especially in those key technical positions at all levels,” she said. “ I think you have to have an understanding that people are going to rotate in and out of government. Not everyone wants to stay in government long term and that’s okay.”

But there are some worries about CISA recruiting going forward. “Just the way they handle the departures, for a lot of folks, I don’t think it gives a lot of encouragement to individuals that ‘Hey, this is a great place to work,’” said one former DHS official.

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The Trump administration is rescinding a Biden-era memo that was intended to help agencies buy secure software, with the current Office of Management and Budget saying it relied on “unproven and burdensome” processes.

A former Biden administration official said the move is “the first major policy step back that I have seen in the administration on a cybersecurity front.”

At issue is the 2022 OMB memo titled “Enhancing the Security of the Software Supply Chain through Secure Software Development Practices,” M-22-18. The administration rescinded the memo Friday.

That memo led to the creation of a common “Secure Software Development Attestation Form” for government agencies that contractors had to use to vouch that their software adheres to a set of security practices. Agencies couldn’t buy from software vendors that couldn’t attest to the security of their products.

“Each agency head is ultimately responsible for assuring the security of software and hardware that is permitted to operate on the agency’s network,” OMB Director Russell Vought wrote in a brief memo Friday to agency heads. “There is no universal, one-size-fits-all method of achieving that result. Each agency should validate provider security utilizing secure development principles and based on a comprehensive risk assessment.”

Nick Leiserson, who served as assistant national cyber director for cyber policy and programs under Biden’s Office of the National Cyber Director, told CyberScoop that rescinding the 2022 memo was a step backward because the memo was meant to use government purchasing power to influence the market, and its repeal “is not good for the security of government systems and for the software that’s used throughout the whole U.S. economy.”

The memo stemmed from the first Biden administration executive order, a response to the major SolarWinds breach that led to agencies being penetrated by alleged Russian hackers, among other notable cyber incidents.

Rescinding it leaves nothing in its place, said Leiserson, now senior vice president for policy at the Institute for Security and Technology, at a time of rising exploitation of software vulnerabilities.

Friday’s decision doesn’t ban everything from the 2022 memo. Vought said agencies could use the common attestation form if they choose; agencies must “maintain a complete inventory of software and hardware and develop software and hardware assurance policies and processes that match their risk determinations and mission needs”; and that agencies could adopt contract terms that require software makers to provide a list of software ingredients, known as a software bill of materials, upon request.

Lieserson disputed the idea that the 2022 memo was burdensome, based on government estimates that the common form would consume three hours and 20 minutes of paperwork. And Leiserson said rescinding it goes against the Trump administration’s goal of deconflicting a tangle of cybersecurity rules: In the place of one common form for all contractors, agency-by-agency forms will increase the regulatory burden.

The Trump administration had previously signaled a desire to roll back other cybersecurity directions for agencies from President Joe Biden.

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The National Institute for Standards and Technology is starting 2026 with a smaller staff, a shrinking budget and some big responsibilities around supporting national security and cybersecurity.

At a meeting Wednesday of the Information Security Privacy Advisory Board, NIST officials provided updates on how they’re grappling with several Trump administration priorities, including mandates on AI, cybersecurity and post-quantum encryption.

Kevin Stine, Director of the Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) at NIST, said the agency has shed more than 700 positions since Trump assumed office last year  through personnel initiatives like resignations, and voluntary deferments. His office, which focuses on IT measurements, testing, and standards, has a headcount of 289 and lost about 89 employees over the last year.

More constraints are on the way, as the latest “minibus” spending package from Congress would cut $13 million from NIST’s labs program, something Stine called “relatively good numbers” compared to other budget proposals he’d seen.

While Stine did not stump for more money or staff, he said the constraints have caused the office to reshuffle remaining resources on a narrower set of priorities.

“It’s forcing a very focused discussion on prioritization of our activities,” said Stine. “Certainly critical emerging technologies and anything aligned with the new NIST strategy, as well as administration priorities, are going to be top of the list and we will adequately resource those.”

NIST’s technical work testing and validating encryption for the federal government is also dealing with impacts from the staffing reductions.

Part of ITL’s mission involves jointly working with the Canadian Centre for Cybersecurity to validate the cryptography of commercial IT hardware and software purchased by their governments.

David Hawes, program manager for the program at NIST’s computer security division,  called this process “associatingly complex” because of how many different implementations and technologies testers must account for when validating encryption, but said in essence it was about establishing a baseline level of trust between vendors and the federal agencies buying their products.

“The way that we think of what our office does is: we’ve got a standard, we’ve got testing, we validate it,” said Hawes. “Can…federal government purchasers and users of these products, can they trust the cryptography? That’s what this is all about. Does it meet the standard? Can it be trusted with the information that’s there?”

Until recently, “a lot of the trust” in NIST’s validation process came from back-end human-led reviews after labs tested products. This approach “heavily required manpower” to sift through hundreds of pages of technical documents, certifications, non machine-searchable PDF files and other unstructured data. Hawes said in years past, this work was typically assigned to junior NIST staffers.

A review of the past 30 cryptographic validations performed by NIST found that it took an average of 348 days to complete each project. However, Hawes said the agency has reduced its backlog from nearly two years in 2020 to about six months today.

The ultimate goal is to reduce the validation process to “days.” Some of that work can be picked up through automation and other streamlined workflows, but Hawes suggested that could be difficult under current staffing numbers.

“I would say [our progress to date] was in spite of the loss,” he said. “We’d be a lot better off in terms of the queue lane now had we not lost the people recently that we did.”

The federal government is shifting its IT from older, classical encryption to newer “quantum-resistant” algorithms meant to protect federal systems and devices from cyberattacks enabled by a quantum computer in the future. As agencies work to identify and replace encryption protecting their most sensitive assets, they also face a deadline: older encryption applications, like RSA, are set to be formally deprecated by 2030.

Hawes said NIST is preparing to support that effort and tested its first post-quantum cryptographic module in recent weeks. However, solving the backlog, he suggested, was the fastest way to provide that help.

“I would say collectively our approach is…getting post-quantum modules validated sooner,” said Hawes. “So get the queue down, get them in, get them through.”

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The acting head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency faced pointed questions from lawmakers Wednesday over CISA personnel decisions and staffing levels.

Members of the House Homeland Security Committee asked Madhu Gottumukkala about a reported attempt to fire the agency’s chief information officer, efforts to push out a large number of staff and whether CISA had enough people to do the job.

Gottumukkala at times sidestepped the questions, with the probing coming from both sides of the aisle. However,  Democrats exhibited deeper worries about the agency’s workforce and its ability to do its job.

Cutbacks at CISA after employees were “bullied into quitting” — among other methods of reducing CISA’s size — have “weakened our defenses and left our critical systems and infrastructure more exposed, and the American people more vulnerable,” said Rep. James Walkinshaw, D-Va.

Said Chairman Andrew Garbarino, R-N.Y.: “This committee supports the administration’s goal of aligning department [of Homeland Security] resources towards urgent homeland security priorities. At the same time, workforce continuity, clear leadership and mission readiness are essential to effective cyber defenses.”

The extent of those CISA personnel reductions was something lawmakers wanted Gottumukkala to be exact about in his answers.

The top Democrat on the panel, Mississippi’s Bennie Thompson, entered a chart into the hearing record that showed the number of personnel had fallen from 3,387 before President Donald Trump’s inauguration to 2,389 by the middle of December, or a loss of 998 people. Those figures aligned closely with the numbers Gottumukkala gave in testimony.

Under questioning from Thompson, Gottumukkala said CISA’s attrition rate was 7.5% last year, a figure he said was lower than most agencies. Gottumukkala said the agency has “the required staff” to do its work, but Thompson said he was still awaiting an expected letter from Gottumukkala on workforce needs and wanted a more precise number on current vacancies.

Gottumukkala also wouldn’t say whether the agency had carried out a study to determine whether its staffing was sufficient. In response to questions from Garbarino, Gottumukkala said there were no further planned organizational changes at CISA.

“We recognize that a disciplined mission requires the right workforce — not a larger one, but a more capable and skilled one,” Gottumukkala said in his opening remarks.

Democrats pressed Gottumukkala repeatedly on whether any CISA personnel had been reassigned to working on immigration enforcement, something he said hadn’t happened during his time at the agency, contradicting published reports to the country and a claim from Gottumukkala that Democrats said was false. The chart Thompson referenced showed 65 employees being reassigned out of CISA.

At times, GOP lawmakers gave Gottumukkala backing on CISA personnel numbers. Rep. Andy Ogles, who chairs the panel’s cybersecurity subcommittee, said, “You’re doing more with less, and you’re doing it more efficiently.” Republican appropriators recently released a homeland security funding bill that would cut CISA’s budget from nearly $3 billion to $2.6 billion.

Responding to a report that Gottumukkala had tried to force out Robert Costello, the agency’s CIO, Gottumukkala said individual agency personnel “decisions are not made in vacuum. It is a leadership-level [decision] at the highest levels, and we work according to how we see the roles fit.” 

Garbarino told reporters after the hearing that “ I don’t know whose decision it is making that personnel [move], but it was stopped, which is probably a good thing.”

Asked about a news story that he failed a counterintelligence polygraph test, Gottumukkala said that “I do not accept the premise of that characterization,” and any answer would have to be discussed in a closed hearing. Garbarino said he hoped an investigation into the polygraph incident would be settled soon.

Democrats repeatedly expressed frustration about Gottumukkala’s testimony. “You’ve managed to answer none of my questions,” Walkinshaw said.

Gottumukkala wouldn’t take questions from reporters after the hearing.

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Congressional appropriators announced funding legislation this week that extends an expiring cyber threat information-sharing law and provides $2.6 billion for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), including money for election security and directives on staffing levels.

The latest so-called “minibus” package of several spending bills to keep the government funded past a Jan. 30 deadline would extend the Cybersecurity and Information Sharing Act of 2015 through the end of the current fiscal year, Sept. 30. Industry and the Trump administration have been seeking a 10-year extension of a law that provides legal protections for sharing cyber threat data between companies and the government, but a deal on Capitol Hill has proven elusive.

The package, announced Tuesday, also would extend the expiring State and Local Cybersecurity Grants Program through the end of fiscal 2026. Both laws temporarily expired during the government shutdown before being included in broader government funding legislation that extended them through Jan. 30. The House Homeland Security Committee has approved legislation on a long-term extension of the grants program, but the Senate hasn’t taken any action on it.

Also notably, the “minibus” — with funding for Labor and Health and Human Services; Education and related agencies; Defense; Homeland Security; and Transportation, Housing and Urban Development and related agencies — includes an extension until Sept. 30 for the Technology Modernization Fund, a program focused on upgrading old and vulnerable federal tech that likewise has had difficulties getting an extension.

The legislation that funds the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) would provide $2.6 billion for CISA. The agency’s budget coming into the Trump administration stood at approximately $3 billion, and President Donald Trump sought nearly half a billion dollars less than that for fiscal 2026.

Under the bill, $39.6 million would go to continuing election security programs, namely election security advisers in each CISA region across the country and the continuation of the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC). Last spring, the organization that supports the EI-ISAC said it no longer was doing so after the Trump administration terminated funding, with DHS saying the EI-ISAC no longer aligns with its mission.

Despite going along with much of what Trump sought on the CISA budget total, the DHS funding bill gives the department a commandment on CISA staffing levels, which have been significantly reduced under the president.

“CISA shall maintain a workforce consistent with the personnel and FTE [full-time employee] funded by the pay and non-pay amounts provided in this Act,” according to a joint explanatory statement from appropriators. “CISA shall not reduce staffing in such a way that it lacks sufficient staff to effectively carry out its statutory missions, including cybersecurity and infrastructure security for the Federal Civilian Executive Branch agencies, SLTT [state, local, tribal and territorial] partners, Sector Risk Management Agencies, international partners, and other stakeholders.”

The House Appropriations Committee touted the DHS spending bill in a news release, saying that “from our borders and ports to aviation and cyber, we deliver the personnel, training, and technology to reinforce our security at every level.”

The fate of the minibus depends on a number of factors, among them the thin GOP House majority and rising Democratic opposition to funding for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

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Legislation to end the federal government shutdown includes a provision that would extend an expired cybersecurity information sharing law through the end of January.

Extension of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 is something industry groups have coveted since even before its sunset at the end of September. Previous attempts to extend it fell short amid the political battle over government funding.

Businesses and cyber experts say the law’s legal protections are vital to sharing threat data between companies, and between industry and the government. Now, with the extension language in the continuing resolution bill that also includes three short-term appropriations bills, Congress is poised to restore it to life, at least temporarily.

The Senate voted 60-40 on Sunday night to advance the legislation. It still would have to get a successful House vote and a signature from President Donald Trump.

If that bill becomes law, the House and Senate would have a short window to advance a more permanent solution. The respective leaders of the House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Andrew Garbarino, R-N.Y., and Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs panel, Rand Paul, R-Ky., have introduced bills that would take significantly different approaches to amending and extending the 2015 law.

The Trump administration has pushed for a 10-year extension without any changes.

Cyber observers say that a long-term lapse of the 2015 law could have dire consequences. But there’s been little sign thus far that its expiration in October has slowed threat information sharing.

Paul could present a hurdle to the overall continuing resolution bill, still.

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A federal agency that supplies budget and economic information to Congress has suffered a cybersecurity incident, reportedly at the hands of a suspected foreign party.

A spokesperson for the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) acknowledged the incident Thursday after The Washington Post reported that the office was hacked, with the attackers potentially accessing communications between lawmakers and researchers at the agency.

“The Congressional Budget Office has identified the security incident, has taken immediate action to contain it, and has implemented additional monitoring and new security controls to further protect the agency’s systems going forward,” said the CBO spokesperson, Caitlin Emma. 

Congress established the office in 1974 to serve as a nonpartisan research organization for the legislative branch. Republicans took aim at the CBO this year when it assessed that a GOP tax and spending policy bill would add trillions to the national debt, prompting conservatives to criticize its conclusions.

It’s not unprecedented for unauthorized parties to obtain access to sensitive information from congressional offices. Hackers who broke into the Library of Congress last year were able to read email correspondence with offices on Capitol Hill. And breach of a health insurance marketplace two years ago exposed the data of House staffers.

The CBO says it has 275 staffers. It requested a budget of $76 million for fiscal 2026, an 8% increase. Nearly half of the increase would “address increased costs to enhance the agency’s cybersecurity and IT infrastructure; such improvements are critical to protecting sensitive data and improving the agency’s computing power for analyzing complex data sets,” according to that request.

The Post reported that officials believe they caught the intrusion early.

“The incident is being investigated and work for the Congress continues,” Emma said. “Like other government agencies and private sector entities, CBO occasionally faces threats to its network and continually monitors to address those threats.”

Greg Otto contributed reporting to this story.

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A landmark program that offers scholarships in exchange for federal service is threatening to saddle students with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of debt amid hiring freezes and budget cuts, raising questions about the future of an initiative proponents say has helped close the government’s cyber workforce gap.

Some CyberCorps: Scholarship for Service participants have had federal agency job and internship offers rescinded this year due to cutbacks and freezes. It’s a condition of their scholarship contract that they must work for the government: Those who can’t find employment there will see their grants, often reaching six-figure sums, converted into loans after 18 months.

Numerous participants who spoke to CyberScoop said they regret signing up for the program, and wouldn’t have done so if they knew then what they know now about the government fulfilling its side of the bargain. They also criticized the communication from the agencies overseeing the program, saying it has been difficult to get clear information about how to fulfill their service obligations or receive updates about job fairs connected to the program. Additionally, they expressed frustration over being told to “get creative” in their job searches, as one email suggested.

One participant said that if CyberCorps can’t meet its obligations due to the federal personnel reductions, it should consider ending the program. The Trump administration has proposed cutting funding for it by 65% in fiscal 2026. And policy experts who have worked to build up the program are fearful about what the current woes mean for future participants.

“I feel like I’ve put my future in jeopardy, my entire future, and I’ve risked lifelong debt because of the whims of someone else,” said a master’s degree student who got a scholarship through CyberCorps. “Whenever my school has brought on a new cohort of students, I cringe at the thought of it, because it’s just more people who are dancing with lifelong debt and possibly no careers.”

While past federal government shutdowns have thrown temporary wrenches into CyberCorps participants’ job hunts, the current environment for federal jobseekers appears to present more enduring challenges. 

“It wasn’t really a concern that people would be able to land [a job] and pay back their debt to the government through time and service,” said Nick Leiserson, senior vice president for policy at the Institute for Security and Technology think tank, and a former Hill aide whose boss, then-Rep. Jim Langevin, D-R.I., was a big supporter of CyberCorps. “And now that has been shaken, and I don’t know how you get that trust back.”

Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, the top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, was critical of the potentially lengthy impact on the CyberCorps program.

“It’s a bait-and-switch where everyone loses, and it will frustrate future efforts to recruit cyber talent into the government,” he said. “The consequences will be felt for decades.”

CyberCorps’ track record

CyberCorps sprang into existence in 2000 in response to a 1998 presidential directive. Since then, the program has had between 4,000 and 5,000 participants, said Mark Montgomery, who worked on the legislation that formalized the program’s creation.

The National Science Foundation and Office of Personnel Management jointly operate the program. An email from NSF said the agency wouldn’t be responding to messages during the current government shutdown. After publication of this story, OPM Director Scott Kupor provided a statement to CyberScoop.

“Bringing top cybersecurity and AI talent into the federal government are critical to our national security. Scholarships for Service is an innovative program that covers the tuition for students who specialize in these areas in exchange for a federal service commitment,” he said. “OPM is committed to the success of SFS and is working closely with the National Science Foundation to ensure CyberCorps participants are supported during this challenging time. Once the shutdown ends, we will issue guidance to agencies encouraging them to fully leverage the program to bring these highly skilled professionals into public service.”

Graduates must get at least one internship with, and then work in the federal government for a period of time equal to the length of their scholarship, although a relatively small percentage are permitted to seek positions in state or local government. (Participants say cyber jobs have been just as few and far between there.) In addition to the scholarships, students also receive stipends.

The internships give students and agencies a chance to determine whether they want to keep working together, and their security clearances are processed ahead of time. “That produces tailored, ready cyber warriors for the federal government,” said Montgomery, now senior director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank.

It also gives the federal government a talent pipeline it wouldn’t otherwise have, Leiserson said. While some of the participants CyberScoop spoke to said they had already aspired to government service, some said it wasn’t on their radar prior to signing up for CyberCorps, which they viewed instead as a means to an end: paying for their education.

There have been relatively few criticisms of CyberCorps or how it’s administered. Henry Young, senior director of policy for the Business Software Alliance, said he viewed CyberCorps more as a relatively small piece of the workforce development pie that needs to include more K-12 education, a focus on other federal programs and more coordination with industry. There are an estimated 500,000 cyber jobs open in the United States.

“It’s a well-meaning and reasonable effort to try and recruit more cybersecurity workers to federal, state and local governments,” Young said. “And I think it is probably working, but not really at the scale of the challenge.”

Student experiences

In response to the current administration’s workforce policies, a group of students have informally organized to seek solutions to their looming debt dilemma; an organizer said there were more than 200 who had joined forces. They say they’ve been frustrated to date in their lobbying to agencies and lawmakers. CyberScoop granted several current participants anonymity to speak about their experiences because they fear potential retaliation as they continue seeking employment.

Some of them are creeping up on the 18-month deadline. One had a job offer rescinded this spring. Another had an internship offer pulled.

Past participants received regular communications about openings that were more prolific in prior years, emails show. A recurring theme among current participants CyberScoop spoke with is criticism of what they see as a lack of assistance or even communication about activities that were once common, like job fairs. For example, they were told to expect a job fair in October to replace the annual January event that was canceled, but the October fair never took place.

Participants say that even when job fairs have been held, they have not been as helpful as in the past, despite attending multiple fairs. A September job fair that participants were “strongly encouraged” to participate in included agencies that didn’t have any roles to fill, and for the others, “the majority of the roles offered were not aligned with cybersecurity, and were not qualified as roles that would count towards our SFS work obligation period,” one program participant wrote.

In-person fairs converted to virtual fairs are a bad option, some said. One said they waited stuck in a queue at a virtual fair for hours only to be told the agency had no openings. 

At the same time, participants have bristled at emails like one in July that urged students to “Get creative in your search!”

Some of the participants were interested in cybersecurity because they were drawn to the technical aspects of working with computers. Others said they felt compelled to join by a desire to do good in the world and protect others.

Some were attracted to government work specifically. That’s made the current situation a deflating experience, one said.

“I am less optimistic about working for the government now than I was before,” a participant said. “It’s just the way they’re treating their employees. It kind of feels like I’m walking into a trap, like they want to fire me more than they want to hire me right now.”

What can be done

There are few alternatives available to CyberCorps participants who aren’t able to find federal employment. They could pursue additional degrees, like a Ph.D, but that doesn’t relieve them of their obligation — it just pushes it back. One participant CyberScoop spoke to was able to get a “research exception” that allows them to study a topic at their school in lieu of the obligation.

Going into the military — potentially for a lengthy term of service — could give students an option to repay the loans, but that’s not an option that anyone who CyberScoop spoke to wanted to pursue.

“We have already experienced federal priorities being ‘shifted’ — multiple of my peers report being forced to transition into immigration work during Summer internships and co-ops, when that was not in the original scope of their work,” one wrote.

One participant struggled with the notion of pursuing a private-sector job, which would potentially offer higher wages that would pay off a loan. But in addition to worrying about fierce competition for those roles, they felt pangs of guilt about the idea of accepting such a role after agreeing to work for the government, and whether it would cause blowback on their university.

Some participants had ideas about how to solve the current dilemma. They suggested things like waiving the payback requirement for students who simply couldn’t fill job openings (they’re competing with each other for those jobs, as well as competing with more seasoned jobseekers); making it a condition of the program that if a scholarship is offered, a job exists for a participant to fill; or simply retiring the program.

Montgomery said Congress could appropriate money for the program beyond what the Trump White House’s fiscal 2026 budget sought. And there’s the possibility that jobs cut as part of the early 2025 Department of Government Efficiency reductions could be reversed.

“I can’t guarantee it, but I think the excesses of DOGE will be walked back,” he said.

Thompson called on the Trump administration to act.

“The Trump administration keeps pretending that cybersecurity is a top priority, but everything they do tells us that it’s a lie,” he said. “Actions matter more than words, and if this Administration wants us to believe they care about cybersecurity, they should act to get CyberCorps back on track.”

Updated, 11/3/25: to include comment from the director of OPM.

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