A handful of employees inside the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency focused on countering disinformation, misinformation and related influence operations were recently put on administrative leave, a DHS spokesperson confirmed to Nextgov/FCW Wednesday.
The statement confirmed earlier reports about staff being sidelined, a move that comes as DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has vowed to overhaul and reshape the scope of the cyber agency amid GOP concerns that its past efforts to reduce false information on social-media sites helped censor conservative voices.
“The agency is undertaking an evaluation of how it has executed its election-security mission with a particular focus on any work related to mis-, dis-, and malinformation,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said. “While the agency conducts the assessment, personnel who worked on mis-, dis-, and malinformation, as well as foreign influence operations and disinformation, have been placed on administrative leave.”
Administrative leave is “administratively authorized absence from duty without loss of pay or charge to leave,” according to the Office of Personnel Management. It was not immediately clear how many staff were placed in that category.
The CISA workforce has been permitted to take the Trump administration’s deferred-resignation offer, reversing an exemption notice saying CISA and other DHS bureaus would not qualify because of national-security reasons, Nextgov/FCW first reported. A judge recently extended the pause on the deferred-resignation program as he considers the legal challenges to that workforce-reduction effort.
In a related move, Attorney General Pam Bondi recently eliminated the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, which was formed in 2017 to address foreign efforts to interfere with U.S. elections.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and leading into the 2020 election, CISA had regular contact with social media platforms to inform them of mis- or disinformation-laced content, crafted or amplified by foreign adversaries and home-grown entities.
But the agency began chilling communications after a July 2023 Missouri-originated lawsuit alleging that the Biden administration’s efforts to flag disinformation violated First Amendment rights and suppressed politically conservative voices.
Many of the posts that were flagged centered around COVID vaccine efficacy, as well as Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud. The case was kicked up to the Supreme Court, which ultimately sided with the Biden administration on the matter last year.
Brandon Wales, a former CISA executive director who departed in August, told lawmakers in a recent hearing that those agency disinformation efforts totaled less than 1% of its budget — around $2 million of its $3 billion topline — and refuted any GOP claims that it censored Americans.
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