A group of House Democrats is asking Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to explain why the Department of Homeland Security reassigned many of its cybersecurity staff to roles focused on Trump-era immigration and deportation work, as well as how those shifts affect U.S. cyberdefenses.
The Monday letter — led by Rep. James Walkinshaw, D-Va., and also signed by Reps. Suhas Subramanyam, D-Va., Eugene Vindman, D-Va., and Shontel Brown, D-Ohio, along with Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C. — argues that DHS violated the Antideficiency Act when it reassigned those Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency staff to roles within Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Federal Protective Service and Customs and Border Protection.
The Antideficiency Act prohibits agencies from spending or obligating funding without congressional approval during a government shutdown. Amid the ongoing lapse in federal funding, the moves “raise serious concerns” about the Trump administration’s motives, the lawmakers say in the missive, which was first viewed by Nextgov/FCW.
“It is difficult to understand how defending the nation’s cyber and physical infrastructure could be viewed as inconsistent with the president’s stated goal of protecting the homeland,” the letter says.
It also argues recent termination notices issued to staff in CISA’s Stakeholder Engagement and Infrastructure Divisions are “the very teams responsible for coordinating with public and private partners to identify, mitigate and prevent cyberattacks.”
The lawmakers urge Noem “to immediately reclassify DHS personnel transferred away from CISA back into cyber defense roles.”
The reassignments have been occurring over the course of several weeks now. Many, but not all, of the reassignments direct staff to ICE, CBP and FPS, two people familiar with the matter previously said.
The Trump administration has steered tens of billions of dollars toward DHS immigration and border security agencies as part of a renewed push to expand detention capacity, accelerate deportations and fortify barriers along the U.S. southern border. Several of those detainments have ensnared U.S. citizens and have raised major legal and ethical questions about ICE’s handling of immigration enforcement.
The Monday letter asks Noem about whether impact assessments were conducted before firings and reassignments, how the cuts square with CISA’s mandate to reduce cyber-infrastructure risks and what concrete mitigations exist to sustain cyberdefenses.
“Firing or reassigning CISA’s cybersecurity experts in the middle of a shutdown isn’t just wrong — it’s illegal and dangerous,” Walkinshaw told Nextgov/FCW in a statement. “These personnel protect our power grids, hospital networks and water systems from cyber attacks. Diverting them to serve a political agenda puts American lives at risk and violates the very laws meant to protect the public.”
At any given time, foreign adversaries and criminal hackers could be targeting U.S. networks, including federal agencies that oftentimes possess high value data like national security plans, financial data and internal government communications.
CISA directed agencies just last week to patch various services offered by application delivery provider F5 after hackers penetrated the company’s systems. The intrusion has been linked to Chinese state-aligned hackers, according to two people familiar with the matter.
In an interview last month, prior to the ongoing lapse in federal funding, Walkinshaw told Nextgov/FCW that the Antideficiency Act “is very clear that, in a shutdown, the federal government can only do essentially two categories of things: functions that are necessary to preserve life and property, or functions required by the Constitution, fulfilling a constitutional duty.”
Cybersecurity has been historically a bipartisan matter in Washington, but CISA, the nation’s core civilian cyberdefense agency, has become a recent subject of political scuffles due to its work combatting mis- and disinformation.
The agency has faced scrutiny from the Trump administration for some time. Top officials have aimed to “refocus” its mission amidst GOP accusations that the agency engaged in censorship of Americans’ free speech. Those claims stem from CISA’s previous collaboration with social media platforms to remove false information online concerning the COVID-19 pandemic, elections and other divisive subjects around 2020.
DHS did not immediately return a request for comment.
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