Daniel, however, worries that the piecemeal approach represented by the committee process might allow many agencies’ budget cuts to sail through. “I’m not surprised that the House Homeland Security Committee added back some of CISA’s funds because cybersecurity remains a relatively bipartisan issue,” he says. “Now, will the Commerce, Justice, and Science Committee add back the NSF funding? What you’re going to see is once you have politics and proclivities on top of cyber, it’s going to get even more fractured in terms of not being a strategic approach to managing the funding for cybersecurity.”
What might help is allowing the Office of the National Cyber Director, which now has a confirmed director in Sean Cairncross, and the head of CISA, which still lacks confirmation for its nominated director leader, Sean Plankey, to weigh in on these budgetary matters.
“How this can get rectified in the long term is through skilled bureaucratic leaders who advocate effectively in the budgeting process. Sean Cairncross and Sean Plankey are exactly those kinds of leaders,” Montgomery says.
