# CISA The **Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency**, created by statute in November 2018 out of DHS's old National Protection and Programs Directorate, defends federal civilian networks and the sixteen critical-infrastructure sectors, and — the part that made it a political target — supported state and local election officials after 2016. Its first director, [[Christopher Krebs]], was fired by tweet on November 17, 2020 for saying the election was "the most secure in American history." Everything that has happened to the agency since follows from that sentence. ## The censorship frame On the right, CISA is the operational heart of the "censorship-industrial complex": the [[Twitter Files]] and the *Missouri v. Biden* litigation cast its 2020 practice of flagging false election claims to platforms as government [[Censorship]], and its "mis-, dis- and malinformation" work became the evidence that the [[Deep State]] had a speech-policing arm. The [[Election Interference]] page carries the mirror image — CISA as the agency that documented foreign interference — and the [[SVR]] and [[Information Warfare Hub]] pages the adversaries it was built to watch. Both frames agree on the facts; they disagree about who the threat was. ## 2025–26: hollowed, not abolished - **Staff.** By January 2026 the agency had lost about **1,000 of roughly 3,300 employees** — quits, layoffs and transfers — and the acting director told the House Homeland Security Committee on January 21, 2026 that it was "back on mission." - **Programs.** The election-security team was eliminated and the program frozen; federal funding for the Multi-State and Election Infrastructure ISACs — the threat-sharing centers state and local governments relied on — was withdrawn, forcing many to leave; the stakeholder-engagement division and the main critical-infrastructure collaboration framework were shut. The March 2025 [[Executive Order - Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections]] reassigned election-integrity work to DHS immigration databases and the [[Election Assistance Commission]] — which was itself left without a quorum in July 2026. - **Leadership.** No Senate-confirmed director since January 2025. Nominee Sean Plankey's confirmation stalled for over a year and he withdrew in April 2026. Acting director Madhu Gottumukkala was removed on February 27, 2026 after a failed polygraph, an attempt to remove the CIO, and uploading sensitive data to a public AI tool; Nick Andersen, head of the cybersecurity division, has been acting since. - **Krebs.** An April 2025 presidential memorandum ordered an investigation of Krebs personally and stripped his security clearance — the former director as the named enemy of the agency he built. The result going into the 2026 midterms is an election-security apparatus that exists on paper, with the states that used it most now paying for or improvising the threat intelligence the federal government used to supply. The [[DHS Component Tree]] shows where the agency sits; the [[Global Intelligence Hub]] and [[US Cyber Command]] pages show what still does the offensive and intelligence work CISA never did. ## See Also - [[Department of Homeland Security]] · [[DHS Component Tree]] · [[Christopher Krebs]] - [[Election Assistance Commission]] · [[Executive Order - Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections]] · [[Election Interference]] - [[Twitter Files]] · [[Censorship]] · [[Deep State]] · [[Information Warfare Hub]] - [[US Cyber Command]] · [[CAISI]] · [[SVR]] · [[Global Intelligence Hub]] - [[Cybersecurity]] — defending networks and infrastructure, and the politics of who is responsible