President Donald Trump on Friday proposed cutting 17% of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s budget as part of his Fiscal Year 2026 spending proposal, targeting the agency over what he falsely called a censorship campaign aimed at conservatives.
Trump’s proposal would cut $491 million from CISA’s $3 billion budget and would eliminate the agency’s work on countering mis- and disinformation, according to a letter that Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought sent to Congress. The letter also mentioned eliminating “external engagement offices such as international affairs.” A separate White House fact sheet said the budget would streamline CISA by “consolidating redundant security advisors and programs.”
“These programs and offices were used as a hub in the Censorship Industrial Complex to violate the First Amendment, target Americans for protected speech, and target the president,” Vought told lawmakers, repeating a debunked right-wing talking point about CISA’s work with state and local governments and tech companies during the 2020 presidential election.
The Trump administration previously paused CISA’s entire election security program — including the agency’s efforts to combat foreign influence operations — and laid off nearly two dozen employees involved in election defense.
Vought accused CISA of being “more focused on censorship than on protecting the Nation’s critical systems,” which “put them at risk due to poor management and inefficiency, as well as a focus on self-promotion.”
CISA spent a tiny fraction of its budget on mis- and disinformation work. “The last time we looked at this, it was something less than $2 million,” which was “far less than 1%” of CISA’s budget, Brandon Wales, the agency's former executive director, said at a hearing in January.
The White House fact sheet said the president's budget “refocuses CISA on its core mission” of protecting federal networks and “coordinating with critical infrastructure partners.” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem made similar remarks during a keynote address at the RSAC Conference in San Francisco this week, saying CISA needed to get “back on mission.”
It remains unclear how the budget — the details of which have not been released — will cut CISA’s international office or its local security adviser programs. Both of those efforts have helped the agency expand its footprint, build its reputation, and earn the trust of government and industry partners over the past few years.
CISA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
CISA to go “back to basics”
Senior CISA officials have spent months telling employees to prepare for cuts aimed at reorienting the agency toward its basic responsibilities.
In a town-hall meeting on Wednesday, acting CISA Director Bridget Bean said the administration was “committed to making sure that CISA is resourced to do our core mission functions as articulated in our statutory mandates.” She described the agency’s task as “getting back to basics, looking at our core authorities [and] making sure that we’re continuing to invest our resources on those most important national, homeland, critical infrastructure and cybersecurity mission areas.”
“We are a six-year-old organization,” Bean told employees. “That means we are old enough to know what we’re doing well and what we’re not doing well.
