The Top Cybersecurity Agency in the US Is Bracing for Donald Trump
A second CISA employee predicts that “compliance efforts like secure-by-design may not have the support that they currently benefit from.”
That retreat from corporate oversight will be a top priority of Musk and other tech billionaires who have flocked to Trump. “The tech influence here, assuming Elon Musk stays in Trump’s good graces, is going to be significant,” the cyber official says.
Without high-level White House backing, CISA’s secure-by-design campaign “becomes toothless,” says the first CISA employee. “Some companies will be less inclined to follow these [guidelines] if they don’t believe that the executive branch is going to support them.”
CISA employees are also watching uneasily to see if Trump officials pressure the cyber agency to water down its draft regulation requiring critical infrastructure operators to report cyber incidents. Congress mandated the rule in a 2022 spending bill, but groups representing infrastructure operators have complained that the draft requirements—which must be finalized by late 2025—are too onerous. Trump could force CISA to scale back the rules in order to appease the private sector.
Trump and his allies want to “get rid of anybody who can enforce the rules, because then the rules don’t matter,” the cyber official says. “In CISA’s instance, that’s going to be pretty significant.”
CISA is also bracing for changes to its election security mission. The agency has already dramatically scaled back conversations with social media companies about online misinformation following a right-wing backlash, but Trump’s team could force CISA to abandon even more of its election security work. CISA staffers worry that Trump will block the agency from participating in state and local election officials’ “Trusted Info” initiative, which encourages Americans to listen to their local election supervisors instead of provocative online claims.
“I think that work is probably dead,” says a third CISA employee.
South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Homeland Security, embraced election conspiracies after Biden’s win in 2020. “Kristi Noem is a Trump loyalist who has backed him in election denial claims, and now she’s going to be in charge of the agency that oversees [CISA],” says the cyber official. “I have a lot of questions about what happens there.”
The third CISA employee expects to see the “persecution of those who have done election security work” once Trump takes office.
Weakening Authorities
Trump’s victory could also have serious consequences for other CISA missions.
Under Biden, CISA gained broader authority and new funding to monitor other agencies’ networks for suspicious activity, turning it into the centralized defender of federal networks that many experts always hoped it would become. That could change under Trump, especially if senior officials close to Trump bristle at CISA’s oversight.
