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Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Homeland Security wants to rein in a cybersecurity agency that took a high-profile public stand and refuted the Republican’s false claims of a compromised 2020 election.
During a confirmation hearing on Friday, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem told the Senate the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) had “gotten far off mission” and “needs to be much more effective, smaller, more nimble to really fulfill their mission.”
CISA has long been a target of conservatives, who criticized the agency’s past work liaising with social media companies about hoaxes and disinformation.
“The misinformation and disinformation that they have stubbed their toe into and meddled with should be refocused onto what their job is, and that is to support critical infrastructure … to have the resources and be prepared for those cyberattacks that they will face,” Noem added during the hearing.
Prominent Republicans have gone further in recent months, suggesting CISA should be eliminated.
“I’d like to eliminate it,” Senator Rand Paul, incoming chair of the Senate’s homeland security committee, told Politico in November. “The First Amendment is pretty important, that’s why we listed it as the First Amendment, and I would have liked to, at the very least, eliminate their ability to censor content online.”
It wasn’t always this way for the agency. It was created in 2018 during the first Trump administration, and the then-president called establishing CISA “very, very important.”
Things quickly soured, though.
In 2020, the agency pushed back against Trump’s claims of a rigged election, calling the contest the most secure in U.S. history.
“There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised,” a statement from CISA read.
Trump soon fired CISA director Chris Krebs via tweet, calling the statement “highly inaccurate.”
Even with Krebs gone, the agency remained a sore spot for Republicans, who argued its work through the 2022 election with social media companies resulted in censorship of right-leaning voices, as well as the limiting of information critical of Joe Biden.
Krebs, for his part, is now an outspoken Trump critic and has claimed the GOP is in a “death spiral” because of their fealty to him as a standard bearer.
