Incoming deputy head of Homeland Security says CISA needs to be reined in

During hearings in the US Senate Tuesday for the role of deputy director of the Dept of Homeland Security, the nominee Troy Edgar said CISA has had the wrong management and needed to be “reined in.”

At the start of the Trump administration more than 130 out of 3,000-odd employees at CISA were laid off, including volunteers from the IT security industry serving on the agency’s Cyber Safety Review Board, aka CSRB. Edgar said the shuttering of the CSRB by President Trump was a “great idea,” and that it will be reconstituted once the right management is installed at the head of CISA.

Edgar is a senior Homeland Security advisor, as well as a hopeful for a top role in the department, and thus is basically giving a public thumbs-up to the administration’s decision to dismantle the review board.

He argued CISA had overstepped its boundaries – by getting too involved in election interference investigations – and needed to “switch gears.” Abolishing its CSRB as part of a reorganization was a logical thing to do, he told senators. The board had been probing China’s Salt Typhoon campaign, in which telecommunication networks in America and beyond had been compromised by Beijing to snoop on potentially millions of people, though now CISA has taken over that role, Edgar said.

The next head of CISA hasn’t been named as yet and the agency is leaderless since Jen Easterly stepped down after the last election. On the campaign trail, Team Trump said it wanted CISA to concentrate on protecting government and civilian networks, rather than investigating disinformation and overseas attempts to destabilize America.

Edgar will now face a vote from both halves of Congress to settle his position. He’s expected to be confirmed easily.

Meanwhile, a new figurehead of President Trump’s Elon-Musk-run cost-slashing DOGE operation has reportedly been chosen.

It appears the new boss is a former staffer at the US Digital Service, aka USDS, which is what was renamed to the Dept of Government Efficiency, aka DOGE, earlier this year to effectively create that latter initiative. She worked at the service from 2018 to 2021, and lists herself as a senior advisor since January for USDS on her LinkedIn page. The White House had no word on the appointment at time of publication.

Gleason has spent a couple of years since her USDS days working at medical companies, and her work in the field previously led President Obama to dub her a “champion of change.” As for what her new administrator role will bring, that’s most likely to be something for Musk to decide.

The Tesla tycoon is not formally a DOGE staffer – he’s now at least officially a senior advisor to the President – but clearly oversees DOGE’s widespread cost-saving efforts, which are enabled by Trump’s hard-line executive order demanding a slimmed-down federal workforce.

It’s certainly not going to be an easy job for Gleason. On Tuesday, about a third of USDS, er, DOGE staff, or 21 people, resigned en masse saying that “DOGE’s actions — firing technical experts, mishandling sensitive data, and breaking critical systems — contradict their stated mission of ‘modernizing federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity’.” ®