Gutting the nation's cyber defense agency while attacks explode is reckless. CISA lost nearly 1,000 employees, about a third of its workforce, in the first half of 2025, and the fiscal 2027 budget proposal would cut 900 more, all while ransomware showed up in 48% of confirmed breaches and health care systems bled millions per incident. Staffing the defense is the mission.
Headcount is not a security strategy. A CISA contractor left AWS GovCloud keys and plaintext passwords sitting in a public GitHub repository, and no amount of hiring fixes that kind of failure — continuous secrets scanning, least-privilege identity governance and real contractor accountability do. Fix the seams between agencies and vendors, because that is where adversaries actually live.
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