Plankey’s potential impact on CISA’s staff and spending cuts: CISA has long been a target of Republicans, primarily due to the minimal amount of now-discontinued work the agency conducted on misinformation efforts. It has also experienced heavy staff and spending cuts spurred by Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative.Over the past seven weeks, CISA has endured at least three rounds of staff cuts. In early February, CISA laid off 130 cybersecurity professionals. Around the same time, CISA fired at least a dozen election-related disinformation workers. Earlier this week, news broke that CISA laid off more than 100 red team workers when the DOGE team suspended the government contracts they worked on.CISA has also cut funding for two key initiatives, the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC) and the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC).It’s unclear whether CISA will implement further funding cuts or whether the DOGE team plans further layoffs at CISA. The speed, fear, and confusion surrounding DOGE’s work have sparked a PR crisis for the Trump administration.Reports suggest that DOGE may be wrapping up its mass government firings to shift into developing digital tools for the government. However, other reports contradict the notion of a DOGE pivot and say that Musk was itching for a now-averted government shutdown to make more firings easier to accomplish.Whatever may happen, Plankey’s nomination and assured Senate approval might help insulate CISA from further DOGE or funding cuts. “I believe getting permanent leadership in place will stabilize CISA and allow clear lines of operation to be established and resourced,” Defense of Democracies’ Montgomery tells CSO.Former CISA deputy director Nitin Natarajan believes that Plankey might help, at a minimum, by making any further cuts more surgical than they have been. “Having a permanent director who is closer to the work and has a history in this space would allow for a more analytic and mission-focused approach to further cuts,” Natarajan tells CSO.
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