Five House Democrats, led by Rep. James R. Walkinshaw and Homeland Security Committee Ranking Member Bennie G. Thompson, sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office on August 20 asking it to formally examine how staffing and budget cuts have affected the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s ability to do its job. The letter, also signed by Reps. Delia C. Ramirez, LaMonica McIver, and Seth Magaziner, cites reporting that nearly 1,000 CISA staff, about a third of the agency’s workforce, left or were removed by mid-2025.

The request lands as the agency’s staffing trajectory keeps reversing on itself. Acting CISA Director Nick Andersen said in March that the agency planned to hire more than 300 people back, and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin told a House Appropriations subcommittee in June that rebuilding CISA’s workforce could take roughly 12 months or longer once a permanent director is confirmed. The administration’s fiscal year 2027 budget request runs the other direction, proposing to cut nearly 900 more CISA positions.

The lawmakers’ own framing is the original insight: as they write, “little is known about the impact of these workforce reductions on CISA’s programs and services or what processes and plans the agency has in place to ensure the agency is hiring the right people to address lost skill sets and meet mission demands.” For CISOs who lean on CISA advisories, KEV catalog updates, and sector-specific guidance as part of their own patch and response cadence, that data gap is not an abstract oversight question. It is a direct unknown about how much slower, or thinner, the agency backing that guidance has become, at the same time attacks on critical infrastructure are accelerating. This publication has argued before that CISOs need a plan for filling that gap themselves, and the agency’s own day-to-day advisory work, like every fresh Known Exploited Vulnerabilities addition, is exactly the output the lawmakers are asking GAO to check is still keeping pace.

Source: Rep. James R. Walkinshaw