SAN FRANCISCO — Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem outlined her plans Tuesday to refocus the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on protecting critical infrastructure from increasingly sophisticated threats — particularly from China — while distancing the agency from what she characterized as mission drift under previous leadership.
Speaking at the 2025 RSAC Conference, Noem provided the most detailed vision yet of how the current administration is pushing CISA to a “back-to-basics” approach aimed at hardening defenses against adversaries who have demonstrated capabilities to infiltrate critical systems.
“We’re going to make sure that we need to put CISA back to focusing on its core mission,” Noem said. “They were deciding what was truth and what was not. And it’s not the job of CISA to be the ‘Ministry of Truth.’ It’s to be a cybersecurity agency that works to protect this country.”
The “Ministry of Truth” comment is a reference to CISA’s misinformation and election security efforts, which have been inflamed in recent weeks after President Donald Trump signed an executive order stripping former CISA leader Chris Krebs of his security clearance and calling for a review of Krebs’ actions as a government employee.
Krebs had played a key role in protecting the 2020 election from hacking and misinformation, consistently debunking baseless claims of widespread electoral fraud made by Trump and his allies. During Krebs’ tenure, CISA created a “rumor control” website, which addressed conspiracy theories about stolen votes and votes cast by deceased individuals.
Noem called that work “inappropriate” in an accompanying on-stage interview with José-Marie Griffiths, the president of Dakota State University.
“That’s not what the mission set was for CISA to be doing. They shouldn’t have been involved in that at all,” she said.
Noem outlined several other priorities for the department, including improved information sharing across government agencies, establishing clearer blueprints for state and local response to cyber incidents, and promoting “secure by design” practices in technology procurement.
“The Department of Homeland Security is going to be using our purchasing power to demand that we have secure products on the market,” she said, noting plans to make recommendations to state and local agencies on secure product procurement and enforce provisions in the Federal Acquisition Regulation.
“We’re not going to be paying for security add-ons that should have already been in the software to begin with,” Noem said. “We are no longer going to be paying extra dollars, and taxpayer dollars, to rectify security lapses that never should have occurred in the first place.”
The secretary also addressed concerns about the restructuring of certain CISA advisory bodies, particularly the Critical Infrastructure Partnership Advisory Council (CIPAC), confirming that some entities were being reworked rather than eliminated outright.
“It’s being reformed and put in place with something that will bring more people to the table and be much more action-oriented,” Noem explained.
She did not mention plans for the Cyber Safety Review Board or the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative, two public-private partnership groups that were launched under the Biden administration and shuttered once Trump assumed office earlier this year.
Noem also described the need to balance federal oversight with state-level innovation, noting her experience dealing with aging state IT systems and their vulnerabilities during her time as governor of South Dakota.
“I feel like most of the innovation can happen at the state level,” Noem said. “But if we’re interacting and interfacing with those states and cities and letting them feed information to us, we’re opening up vulnerabilities to the entire system. So it’s in our nation’s best interest” to help secure those systems.
Noem also addressed questions about artificial intelligence, suggesting that the government should provide guardrails while allowing for continued innovation.
“The government is not here to be the answer to everybody’s problems,” she said. “We can put some boundaries there, but it really needs to maintain the flexibility in order for us to be responsive and to stay in front of those who would use it against us as weapons.”
Plus de détails sur l’article original.