CISA work not ‘degraded’ by Trump administration cuts, top agency official says

Nick Andersen rebutted criticisms from industry, state and local governments and the Hill about where CISA capabilities stand.

A top official at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on Thursday rejected concerns that personnel and program cuts at CISA have hindered its work.

Nick Andersen, who just began serving as executive assistant director of cybersecurity at CISA this month, said he’s seen the agency function at a high level from both the outside and inside.

“There’s been an awful lot of reporting recently about CISA and the potential for degraded operational capabilities, and I’m telling you, nothing can be further from the truth,” he said at the Billington Cybersecurity Summit. “It is just a fantastic opportunity to see the high-level output and throughput that this team has.

“There is not a single instance where I can think of that somebody reaches out — whether it’s in our remit or not, we are connecting them with the right level of resources, and we are helping them to make themselves right, whether it’s incidents that we see affecting a state/local partner, small- or medium-sized businesses or the largest critical infrastructure owner/operators,” he continued.

The Trump administration has cut or plans to cut more than 1,000 personnel at the agency, a third of its total full-time employees, and has sought nearly half a billion dollars in funding reductions.

CISA’s shuttering of an array of programs has drawn widespread criticism from many in industry as well as from state and local governments who have partnered with the agency, not to mention concerns from Capitol Hill.

But Andersen said CISA has full support from President Donald Trump, who clashed with agency leadership in his first term, and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

“We have exceedingly strong relationships with” other government agencies and the private sector, Andersen touted. “The level of commitment within this team is second to none, and we’re just going to continue to hone and focus [on] that operational mission of what CISA should be delivering on. We’re going to continue to sort of separate out the fluff, but we are going to take every single dollar, every single resource, every single manpower hour to deliver an even sharper focus on those core capabilities in keeping with what President Trump identified as our administration priorities.”

Those priorities, Andersen said, include fortifying federal networks. “Raising the collective bar across the dot gov is a big one,” he said.

It also includes strengthening relationships with critical infrastructure owners and operators. “We want to be able to work very closely with our critical infrastructure partners on focused resilience efforts, be able to raise the bar in a sprint between now and 2027 as we prepare for the potential of China making good on its promise … to take Taiwan,” he said, so that “our critical infrastructure is not going to be held hostage.”

And it includes strengthening partnerships with other federal agencies as well as state and local governments, Andersen said.

Government

• FBI officials say AI is bolstering adversaries, emphasizing need to focus on cyber basics, patching

• Feds accuse China of ‘systematic’ distillation of U.S. AI models

• CIA’s Michael Ellis says cyber intelligence is changing how the agency operates

• The G7 tells industry to hurry up and prep for post-quantum encryption

Technology

• European parliament members call for slowdown of Serbia’s EU entry over spyware use

• FCC proposes public scorecard to rate telecoms on anti-robocall efforts

• Pegasus, NoviSpy variant spyware found on devices of Serbian activists

• Wyden seeks upgraded NSA security guidance on commercial VPN use

Threats

• Microsoft discloses two actively exploited zero-days among 974 vulnerabilities

• Russian national extradited to US for alleged involvement in bank-account takeover scheme

• Attackers exploit zero-days in consistently besieged SonicWall product

• Jail time for Maine child in 764 marks turning point in federal law enforcement

Policy

• Whistleblower says USPS deploying new, ‘untested’ IT systems governing mail-in ballots

• ‘Watershed 250’ test program in Texas looks to private sector for water cybersecurity help

• Former sexual abuse victims say Grok used their images, videos to train deepfake capabilities

• Cyber threats nudge Trump to sign executive order on foreign equipment in U.S. energy infrastructure