In his first term, President Trump established the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to defend the nation’s infrastructure against cyberattacks.
In his second, he has taken aim at the agency.
Mr. Trump has sought to chip away at major aspects of CISA, a target of his ire after it undercut his false claims that the 2020 election was rigged. He has dismantled its election-related defenses, and called last year for a “comprehensive evaluation of all of CISA’s activities.”
The lapse in funding for the Department of Homeland Security, CISA’s parent agency, is only the latest setback, temporarily winnowing its already thinning ranks.
In January 2025, CISA employed about 3,400 people. That number has dropped to below 2,400. The shutdown means employees are now furloughed, leaving fewer than 1,000 of them to continue working.
The agency has navigated these cuts while being effectively rudderless without a Senate-confirmed leader. The result is a demoralized work force concerned about the agency’s ability to ward off threats, according to former agency officials.
Lawmakers have shared those worries.
“You just can’t lose a third of your work force and accomplish the mission and authorities that you have,” Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, said after an oversight hearing in late January.
Mr. Thompson, a co-sponsor of the law that created CISA in 2018, also cited a lack of resources and diminishing institutional knowledge as causes of the agency’s woes.
Marci McCarthy, CISA’s director of public affairs, said in a statement that “CISA remains unwavering in its mission to protect the systems Americans rely on — strengthening federal networks, empowering businesses and fortifying critical infrastructure nationwide.”
Since Mr. Trump’s electoral victory in 2024, chaos has become routine at the agency.
During the transition, the Trump administration ramped up its scrutiny of the agency, asking employees to justify their work, in some cases by pointing to specific statutes and laws, according to one former official who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
Fear and rumors spread rapidly, including speculation over the possibility of a reorganization.
Senior staff members privately discussed what a reorganization could look like, but politically appointed leaders told them that their input was not needed, and that direction would come from top Trump officials, said one former official with knowledge of the episode. As a result, the official added, senior staff members felt sidelined.
In her statement, Ms. McCarthy disputed that employees had been sidelined or had faced reassignments, saying the assertions “mischaracterize routine personnel management.”
“CISA’s staffing decisions are driven by mission need and strategic alignment — not rumor,” she added.
At an oversight hearing in January, Madhu Gottumukkala, the agency’s acting director, pushed back on the idea that the agency had plans to reorganize, even as he acknowledged that it had undergone “a lot of changes in the last year.”
Last February, the administration put more than a dozen of CISA’s election security workers on leave as part of an investigation into its election work, a move that had a chilling effect on the 100 or so people in the division.
In other units, some employees faced a difficult choice: accept unfavorable reassignments, sometimes to locations in different parts of the country or at different agencies entirely, or leave, according to the former officials.
The uncertainty prompted many employees to question whether they wanted to stay or whether the agency could even do its basic work. By the end of the year, about a third of the work force, including many senior staff members, had decided to leave. The departures were a significant brain drain, said one former official who departed in the spring because of concerns over the agency’s direction.
The former official described being part of “a flood” of departures and recalled how the agency had a dedicated room for employees to return their equipment and badges, with stations set up because of the number of people stepping down.
The exodus comes as the agency awaits a Senate-confirmed director. Mr. Trump has selected Sean Plankey, a cyber expert who served in the first Trump administration, to lead CISA, but his nomination has languished for nearly a year as a few Republican and Democratic senators continue to block all Department of Homeland Security nominees over concerns about the management of agencies like the Federal Emergency Management Agency and CISA.
The leadership gap has only been exacerbated by reports that Mr. Gottumukkala failed a polygraph test after he sought access to sensitive intelligence, lawmakers and former CISA employees said.
The turmoil has also spilled into Congress, where lawmakers have struggled to reauthorize a cyber law with broad bipartisan support, in part because its name is similar to CISA’s.
The law protects U.S. companies from cyberthreats by facilitating information sharing between the public and private sectors.
But in June, Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, said that he would only support reauthorizing the law if it included a clause to stop the agency from engaging in censorship. Mr. Trump and his allies have long been aggrieved by the agency’s campaign to counter misinformation, equating it with censorship.
Despite bipartisan efforts to get Mr. Paul to relent, he has not backed down, and the law lapsed twice during the recent government shutdowns.
While lawmakers passed a short-term reauthorization to the cyber law earlier this month, they have yet to agree on a funding deal for the Department of Homeland Security.
CISA’s acting director and former officials said that the agency was likely to be able to continue its most critical work during the shutdown, but that it would not be as prepared to respond if there was a major cyberattack on federal websites or critical infrastructure.
In a congressional hearing this month, Mr. Gottumukkala addressed the shutdown, saying that about 60 percent of his agency’s work force would be furloughed. By contrast, other agencies within D.H.S., like Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Transportation Security Administration, have left their staffing mostly intact.
Even though Mr. Gottumukkala said the agency would continue operations that are “essential to protecting life and property,” he warned that U.S. infrastructure would be more vulnerable.
“A shutdown forces many of our frontline security experts and threat hunters to work without pay — even as nation-states and criminal organizations intensify efforts to exploit critical systems that Americans rely on — placing an unprecedented strain on our national defenses,” he said.
Adam Sella covers breaking news for The Times in Washington.
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