Jen Easterly, the outgoing head of the U.S. government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said Wednesday she hopes her agency is allowed to continue its election-related work under new leadership despite “contentiousness” around that part of its mission.
“I really, really hope that we can continue to support those state and local election officials,” she said during an event in Washington, D.C., with the nonprofit Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “I think they’ve benefited by the resources that we’ve brought. I think they would say that.”
CISA is responsible for protecting critical infrastructure, including the nation’s dams, banks and nuclear power plants. Voting systems were added after the 2016 election and Russia’s multipronged election-meddling effort.
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With the transition to a new administration under President-elect Donald Trump, several Republican lawmakers and right-wing advocacy groups have advocated to have CISA shuttered, gutted or have its election responsibilities significantly reduced.
Among the most vocal critics is GOP Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who told Politico in November that he would like to eliminate the agency. He has spoken in the Senate about wanting to limit CISA’s powers instead of expanding them.
Easterly said she was proud of how CISA had built trust and close communications with state and local election officials of both major political parties since the agency began in 2018, under the first Trump administration.
She said CISA’s work with the intelligence community to quickly analyze and declassify foreign influence campaigns from Russia, China and Iran ahead of the 2024 presidential election was “incredibly successful.” The agency worked with state and local elections officials after foreign online disinformation surfaced in the weeks leading up to the November election. Those efforts included staged videos from Russian actors falsely portraying election fraud in swing counties.
“I think frankly we’re going to see more and more serious threats from our foreign adversaries, and we have to anticipate it and be able to deal with it as we did for the 2024 election,” Easterly said.
Trump created CISA during his first administration, but fired Chris Krebs, the agency director, after he said the 2020 election was safe and secure.
Trump has not yet nominated a replacement for Easterly. While Trump’s campaign platform highlighted the importance of protecting critical infrastructure from cyber threats, he hasn’t provided details of his vision for CISA’s election work.
Easterly on Wednesday also spoke about the growing threat China poses to the nation’s critical infrastructure, among them water, transportation and telecommunications systems. She repeated past warnings that China is infiltrating civilian infrastructure and said the nation needs to be prepared for future disruptions.
Related: Watch: Top Cyber Officials Testify on China’s Cyber Threat to US Critical Infrastructure
