Somewhere in America right now, there’s a router or a security camera doing something its owner has no idea about: passing on a cyber attack that started in China. For nearly eight years, that’s how hackers working for the Chinese government broke into some of America’s most sensitive institutions: the Justice Department, the Federal Reserve, the Senate, NASA, our national laboratories, and federal health agencies. This week, the Trump administration took a victory lap for shutting down two of the platforms behind it — all while supporting a budget tailored to cut hundreds more jobs from the people who stopped it.
Disrupting the hack was a real victory, and it took years of thankless work to get here. But that win doesn’t cover for what’s happening to the agency built to catch the next threat. As we stand here today, Trump is actively working to gut America’s cyber defenses at the same time we need them most.
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Throwing Away What Works
According to the Justice Department, the platforms hacking our systems were operated by a Chinese company whose paying customers included China’s principal civilian intelligence agency and the People’s Liberation Army. The company sold Chinese intelligence and military agencies a way to break into American networks without leaving an obvious trail back to China. The FBI and Justice Department disabled the platforms by seizing the internet domains they needed to operate. Federal agents obtained court orders to seize those domains, and once the government took control of them, both platforms stopped working.
It was a clear success for our intelligence community. But Trump is taking credit for a cybersecurity victory while eliminating the defense mechanisms responsible for our safety as a nation.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, usually called CISA, is the federal government’s lead civilian cyber-defense agency. It helps protect federal networks and works with the private companies and local governments that run much of the infrastructure Americans depend on. CISA didn’t conduct this particular takedown; the FBI and Justice Department did. But CISA has an adjacent, connected job: it helps federal agencies, local governments, and private companies prevent cyberattacks and respond when hackers get through.
But here’s the kicker. Nearly one-third of CISA’s workforce (about 1,000 people) left or was pushed out during the first months of Trump’s second term. His proposed budget for next year would cut hundreds of millions of dollars more from the agency and eliminate nearly 900 additional positions from its ranks.
Last week, several House Democrats asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate what those losses have done to the agency. “At precisely the moment when our adversaries are accelerating attacks against critical infrastructure,” they wrote, CISA “has lost nearly one-third of its workforce.”
A Six-Year Grudge
The history of CISA explains why the Trump administration has treated it with hostility. Although Trump signed the law creating the agency in 2018, it soon fell out of his good graces when they used their standing as a protector of our election systems to call out his lies claiming that the 2020 election was stolen.
CISA and its election partners reported that the vote had been “the most secure in American history.” They found no evidence that voting systems had deleted votes, changed votes, or otherwise been compromised. Trump in turn fired CISA director Christopher Krebs days later for refusing to support his false claims. During his second term, Trump went after Krebs again, revoking his security clearance and ordering an investigation of him. His administration also placed election-security employees on leave and ended funding for programs that helped state and local officials share information about cyber threats.
As a way to carry out Trump’s grievance, his administration is now targeting the agency’s staff and budget, leaving the type of cybersecurity that just took on China in the crosshairs. The White House says its proposed cuts will eliminate “weaponization and waste” but the real reason that Trump is cutting CISA is because its experts reported what they found instead of what he wanted to hear. His grudge from 2020 not only has tested our democracy, but in 2026 it now is threatening our cyber-defense capabilities.
Invisible Success
Most cybersecurity work happens out of public view. Investigators may spend years tracing a single intrusion before they can identify who carried it out. In fact, their victories often amount to nothing happening at all: a hospital keeps operating, a power company stays online, or a foreign government loses access before it can use what it found.
Because the public rarely sees those successes, Trump can treat the people responsible for them as expendable. He can claim credit for one domain seizure while cutting the staff we need to thwart the next attack. We may not see the damage until another attack is attempted.
National security work has to continue from one administration to the next. After all, China can build new hacking tools. What we can’t do, unfortunately, is replace the experts Trump pushed out.
Let's be clear: deciding to NOT defend the American people against inimical Chinese cyberattacks comes right after the GOP in 2025 already decided to stop defending the American people against Russian cyberattacks, and dismantled that task force too.
All the unnecessary wars already proved that Democrats are SO much more competent and care so much more, when it comes to issues of defense and the military.
But this time, a neofascist GOP is literally handing over the US' security to Russia and China on a platter.
That's not being "weak" on defense. It's deliberately BETRAYING the American people.
DT has done this over and over - gutting the very agencies that have saved his butt and are safeguarding the nation. DT votes by mail, uses security to evade the assassins' bullets, throws our leadership-gutted military around like they're the food he throws on the White House walls, eats food that used to be protected for us by federal watchdogs and for him still is, etc. Thank you for alerting us to yet another to add to the list. VOTE! Protect, Encourage, Expand