Lawmakers Grill Noem Over CISA Funding Cuts, Demand Trump Cyber Plan

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem faced intense questions from the House Appropriations Homeland Security Subcommittee.

She wants to slash almost $500 million from the CISA budget.

While the appropriations committee was looking at DHS’s funding across all of its agencies, they made a point of demanding more info on the administration’s financial plans for CISA.

Noem said that cutting the budget was part of refocusing CISA towards core cybersecurity.

One committee member said that cuts to CISA programs let Russia, China and Iran steal our secrets. Noem said that she was okay with letting Russia, China and Iran launch disinformation and misinformation campaigns against America.

For example, one example of waste, she said, was the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis center (MS-ISAC) which shares information between states regarding pending and active cyberattacks against government agencies. That doesn’t seem very useful to her, apparently.

The committee also asked how she plans to address intrusions into US networks like the one by China into US telecommunications networks (Salt Typhoon). She said Congress should just wait for the president’s grand plan. When asked when they would see this grand plan, the best she came up with is “shortly”.

When Noem was asked why, if she was concerned about the Chinese attacks, she was going to cut the budget by half a billion dollars. All they got were the sounds of silence.

Republicans weren’t any happier with her than Democrats.

One member said that they had money to provide security for the president’s birthday parade but not for critical cybersecurity and disaster recovery funding. I don’t think that was a positive assessment.

It doesn’t sound like it went well for Noem. Credit: The Record

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