NASHVILLE, Tenn. — House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green, R-Tenn., said he asked staffers working for Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to carefully consider how to reduce the size of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
CISA, the top cybersecurity office in the Department of Homeland Security, has initiated efforts to significantly reduce its workforce by as much as a third of its size, including possible cuts to internal agency staff handling threat hunting and vulnerability management, people familiar with the moves have previously said.
Green, who spoke with Nextgov/FCW Friday in an interview on the sidelines of the Vanderbilt Summit on Modern Conflict, said that cuts to CISA are acceptable but that the Trump administration needs “to be very careful about the streamlining.”
“I’m okay with cuts at CISA, but what I’m trying to say is we have to be very careful about who and what we cut, because CISA does have a mission to overwatch our critical infrastructure and make sure the bad guys aren’t getting in,” he said. “I told [Noem’s] people that.”
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and leading into the 2020 election, CISA had regular contact with social media platforms to inform them of mis- or disinformation-laced content that was crafted or amplified by foreign adversaries or other home-grown entities. But it began chilling communications following a July 2023 Missouri-originated lawsuit alleging that the Biden administration’s efforts to flag disinformation violated First Amendment rights and suppressed politically conservative voices.
Amid those accusations, Noem has vowed to conduct a broad reevaluation of CISA’s spending priorities.
“CISA needs to be much more effective, smaller, more nimble, to really fulfill their mission, which is to hunt and to help harden our nation’s critical infrastructure,” she said in January, noting that the agency’s work should be “refocused” away from tapering mis- and dis-information online.
Green’s remarks are some of the first from the committee chairman that tacitly suggest current plans to downsize CISA and DHS more broadly risk slicing out core cybersecurity teams. One person familiar with the reductions previously said that the cyber agency may be ending all threat hunting contracts with the private sector and noted that multiple contracts have already been terminated.
Green, who has advocated for moves to reduce CISA’s work in the disinformation space, said the agency “has a small role to play, but it doesn’t have a role in deciding what’s legitimate speech and what isn’t legitimate speech.”
He added: “The intrusions from foreign actors is something that CISA should watch, and the administration should make the decision on how that information is released to the public.”
Asked about whether President Donald Trump’s executive action signed Wednesday night that targeted former CISA Director Chris Krebs was necessary, Green said he doesn’t know because he doesn’t have full, non-public details on the move.
“It’s pretty recent, and so I don’t have a lot of the details on why he was fired. There’s always potentially some reason, and I haven’t dug into it. I don’t have the details of why he was fired,” Green said, acknowledging that he read a White House fact sheet about the order but added that there’s “always more to the story” about the decision.
