Most federal cybersecurity reporting rules are duplicative, study finds

The Government Accountability Office looked at 117 rules across 37 agencies and found 70% had reporting requirements that were overlapping.

Seven out of 10 federal cyber regulations requiring written reports to federal agencies are duplicated elsewhere, a report from a government watchdog found in a report to Congress Wednesday.

And so far, efforts to de-conflict haven’t had much success, the report from the Government Accountability Office concluded.

At the request of two top lawmakers, the GAO examined federal cyber regulations at 37 agencies. It counted 80 out of 117 rules that “either contain the same kind of reporting requirement applicable to a sector or the same reporting requirement as at least one other regulation.”

The desire to harmonize those conflicting rules gathered steam under the Biden administration, as it undertook a more aggressive push to regulate cybersecurity than prior administrations. It has continued into the second Trump administration.

The GAO scrutinized regulations that required the private sector to report cybersecurity incidents, plans and reviews to federal agencies, as part of a study sought by House Homeland Security Chairman Andrew Garbarino, R-N.Y., and the top Democrat on the Senate counterpart to Garbarino’s panel, Gary Peters, D-Mich.

In some cases, a single critical infrastructure sector could have duplication with several agencies. For example, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has been working on a regulation stemming from the 2022 Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act (CIRCIA), which would require critical infrastructure owners and operators to report when they are the victims of major attacks or make ransomware payments.

Elements of the financial services sector might fall under one of 15 preexisting cybersecurity reporting rules, depending on the agency that has oversight, but they may also be subject to the pending CIRCIA rules, GAO noted.

A 2024 national security memorandum tasked the Office of the National Cyber Director and the Department of Homeland Security to harmonize conflicting regulations, and both agencies made some progress on those goals.

But the executive branch paused some of those efforts after Trump issued an executive order in March of last year while the administration conducted a study of the 2024 memo, a study that was still underway as of last month, according to the GAO.

As such, on harmonization, “many past federal efforts have experienced delays and made limited progress,” the GAO concluded in its report Wednesday, its latest on the topic. 

Congress has also looked at ways to streamline cybersecurity regulations.

GAO’s study was focused only on federal rules. BreachRx, a cyber incident response firm, published its own report Wednesday looking at major cyber incidents and how overlapping regulatory reporting obligations came into play, folding in regulations from states and other sources.

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