Republicans on Capitol Hill are scrambling to save an embattled cybersecurity agency after they voted to gut it to appease President Donald Trump, according to a new report.
Politico reported on Wednesday that Republicans have changed their tune on the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency after an unreleased OpenAI model attacked another company and roamed free on the internet for four days. The move comes at a time when the Trump administration is ramping up its rhetoric about elections and is attempting to make some wholesale revisions to how American elections are conducted ahead of the midterms.
“A growing number of Republicans are advocating for rehiring staff and restoring funding to the nation’s cyber agency, following a torrent of punitive measures against CISA over the past 18 months,” the report reads in part. “The agency fell out of favor with President Donald Trump in 2020 after former CISA Director Christopher Krebs said the presidential elections were the ‘most secure in American history’ — an assertion that Trump has repeatedly refuted — and it has drawn his ire ever since.”
The efforts to rescue CISA “from exile” now include Republicans who previously voted to defund the organization, such as Reps. Andy Ogles (R-TN) and Morgan Luttrell (R-TX), according to the report. Luttrell, who previously voted to prevent CISA from paying its director’s salary, now describes the agency as “one of those valuable defensive systems that protects everything that nobody pays attention to,” the report added.
“The future battlefield will be shaped by artificial intelligence, autonomous systems and cyber capabilities,” Rep. Nick LaLota (R-NY) told Politico. “Congress must ensure America stays ahead of our adversaries by investing in the technologies, infrastructure, and workforce needed to defend our nation.”
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