Trump Administration Cyber Policy Shifts: Regulatory Rollbacks and Reduced Federal Election Security Support
National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross called on industry to help the Trump administration reduce cybersecurity regulatory burden and improve “friction” points in cyber information sharing, while also urging companies to lobby Congress to renew the expired Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 with a proposed 10-year extension. Cairncross framed the administration’s approach as partnering with industry rather than expanding private-sector mandates, and said a forthcoming administration cybersecurity strategy would be released “sooner rather than later.”
Separately, state election officials are increasingly planning to self-fund and self-organize election security as CISA scales back election security support, including work related to disinformation, and as election security specialists are reportedly fired or sidelined. With reduced federal staffing and no dedicated congressional election security grant funding, states described feeling they are “going it alone”; Arizona, for example, advanced a $650,000 state package to patch vulnerabilities and recover from a prior cyberattack on its political candidate portal. A third report described U.S. manufacturers expanding collaboration through MFG-ISAC—including tabletop exercises, OT training, and incident response playbooks—but this activity is sector-focused and not directly tied to the federal policy and election-security pullback described elsewhere.
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