“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’s top cyber officials have emphasized the urgent need to take aggressive action to deter increasingly brazen foreign cyberattacks. Trump himself, however, has repeatedly brushed aside the notion that foreign cyber activity is anything even really noteworthy.

When Trump’s team talks about foreign hacking, be it China’s alleged massive cyberespionage campaign against telecommunications companies or its efforts to take root in U.S. critical infrastructure, they insist the actions can’t be tolerated and must be deterred.

“We need to find some way to communicate that this is not acceptable,” Alexei Bulezel, senior director for cybersecurity at the National Security Council, said in May when asked about the groups thought to be behind those campaigns, Salt Typhoon and Volt Typhoon.

More recently, last month, National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross cast a wider net about foreign adversaries who want to “do us harm,” saying, “To date I don’t think the United States has done a tremendous job of sending the signal, in particular to China, that their behavior in this space is unacceptable.”

Trump, by contrast, has framed all that differently, to the point of dismissiveness.

Asked in June about Chinese hacking of U.S. telecoms, theft of intellectual property and more, Trump answered, “You don’t think we do that to them? We do. We do a lot of things. … That’s the way the world works. It’s a nasty world.”

Asked in August about whether he would discuss alleged Russian hacking of U.S. courts with Vladimir Putin, Trump replied, “I guess I could, are you surprised? … They hack in, that’s what they do. They’re good at it, we’re good at it, we’re actually better at it.”

The gulf between what Trump says about cyber compared to what his top deputies say provokes a variety of reactions from cyber experts and former officials. It sends mixed signals to adversaries, some say, while others say it might just reflect facts of life about today’s cyber environment or a president who doesn’t behave or think conventionally.

At the same time, Trump’s casual messaging about cyber may reflect a broader trend of nations increasingly treating cyber operations as a routine instrument of power.

A need for consistency?

A lack of consistency between the president and his personnel muddles a clear message to adversaries, and downplaying cyberattacks is unwise, said Christopher Painter, who served as the top State Department cyber official under President Obama.

“Either cyber and cyberattacks are a priority or they’re not, and it’s [a] problem if you communicate they’re not serious by saying, ‘Oh, we don’t care now,” said Painter, now a nonresident senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Cyberattacks are serious, he said, and “We need to say it, and we need to be consistent about it, and we need to make sure we take it seriously. So I am concerned that it undermines the narrative that I think we need.”

Trump downplayed foreign cyber activity during his first term, too, both publicly and privately, in the latter case shunting away an adviser while the president tried to watch a golf tournament by saying “You and your cyber … are going to get me in a war — with all your cyber s—t.” According to Painter, Trump often links the issue to Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, a subject he resents because he believes it undermines the legitimacy of his presidency.

But Painter also noted Trump wasn’t the first to downplay any kind of foreign cyber activity, with former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper remarking about the 2015 Office of Personnel Management hack, “You have to kind of salute the Chinese for what they did. If we had the opportunity to do that, I don’t think we’d hesitate for a minute.”

Clapper also drew a line between the OPM breach, which he said was “passive intelligence collection activity” and a full-fledged cyberattack. There’s a long-lasting debate over whether cyberespionage constitutes a cyberattack.

Trump officials, too, have emphasized they’re more worried about the activity of Volt Typhoon, with its potential for disruption, than that of Salt Typhoon, which is more espionage-focused.

Some analysts acknowledge that Trump has a point when he dismisses cyberespionage as a fact of modern life rather than something that requires retaliation. “My own experience says that it’s extremely difficult, if not impossible, to deter espionage,” said Michael Daniel, who held the White House’s top cyber position under Obama and is now president of the Cyber Threat Alliance.

Any threat in an attempt to deter cyberespionage has to be credible to be effective, said Erica Lonergan, an assistant professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. And there are a few things working against the United States making credible threats.

“We do it, because we all do it, and everyone knows we do it,” she said. Next, the potential consequence has to be more harmful than the value of cyberespionage, which is extremely useful to have. “We’re not going to go to war over cyberespionage. No matter how many times a member of Congress calls it an act of war or not, we didn’t go to war over the spy balloon.”

Yet other analysts read Trump’s comments on foreign cyber activity differently. He might have an aggressive reaction to a more clearly damaging attack than the incidents he’s downplayed, said James Siebens, a fellow with Stimson Center’s Strategic Foresight Hub.

“If we were talking about a genuinely destructive cyberattack that cost people’s lives, I would imagine that there would be a fairly forceful response,” said Siebens, who recently co-authored a study on cyber deterrence. “My view is that President Trump was doing something that he often does, which is to state plainly things that make people uncomfortable, but are nonetheless observable and rooted in an important truth.”

Richard Harknett, director of the Center for Cyber Strategy and Policy at the University of Cincinnati, took Trump’s recent remarks as a comment more on the potency of U.S. capabilities compared to its adversaries.

“It wasn’t sort of a complacency, it was more confidence,” said Harknett, who served as the first scholar-in-residence at United States Cyber Command and National Security Agency beginning in 2016. Of course, he said, “The president tends to speak in confident terms regardless.”

Daniel said that some  contradictions between Trump and his cyber team are to be expected. Different officials are bound to have differences of opinion, including in the Trump administration, which has hardly been a “paragon of consistency” in its messaging to the world, he said. Daniel added that deterrence is a challenge for every administration; throughout history, the United States has often threatened not to tolerate certain actions, but then failed to respond when those actions occurred. 

Several experts said they were willing to give the administration time to iron out any potential contradictions. Harknett said it’s hard to read too much into public comments alone right now. More important, Harknett and others said, will be what the administration says in a forthcoming cyber strategy.

A global trend?

Trump is not the only world leader in recent months to speak about his nation’s cyber activity in a more casual manner. At the beginning of this month, Chinese President Xi Jinping and South Korean President Lee Jae Myung joked about the security of a cell phone gift that Xi gave his counterpart, which ended in Xi quipping, “You can check if there’s a backdoor.”

It was “weird for Xi, especially because the Chinese are loath to ever admit they do anything,” Painter said, even if he was joking.

The openness about cyber doesn’t end there, extending to a number of cases where nations that historically haven’t pointed the finger at other countries over alleged cyberattacks are more willing to do so by releasing technical analyses.

“We’re starting to see more non-Western countries, and notably China, making attributions back now,” said Allison Pytlak, director of the Cyber Program at the Stimson Center think tank and the co-author of the deterrence report with Siebens. Singapore recently made its first cyber attribution as well.

Trump officials have been touting offensive operations, which used to be a topic of very little public discussion. And other nations have been growing more open about cyber operations, from Japan’s recent active cyber defense legislation to Australia establishing its own Cyber Command last year.

‘There is more openness about cyber in general, the strategic level, in terms of leaders being willing to talk about cyberespionage, cyber offense,” Lonergan said. “No one talked about cyber offense in the U.S. government for years.”

That openness could turn out to be a good thing, Pytlak said. It could “spark debate” in the public about the very nature of cyber, about the differences between the harm espionage causes and the kind of national security threat other kinds of activity poses.

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