Why leadership at CISA matters – now more than ever

COMMENTARY: President Trump’s nominee to lead the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) was not included earlier this month among dozens of administration nominees receiving confirmation votes in the U.S. Senate.

With Congress now not slated to return until Jan. 6, political holds unrelated to cybersecurity have placed Sean Plankey’s nomination at risk.

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Unless something changes unexpectedly, the legislative body’s failure to confirm him means Plankey’s nomination will expire on Dec. 31, so the President will need to re-nominate Plankey or another leader, and the nation could lose several months more in official cyber leadership, preparation, and execution as another long nomination process ensues. 

It's irresponsible and dangerous to the point of malfeasance to leave CISA leaderless in a time of digital war with such capable, determined, and active adversaries such as the Chinese and Russian governments.

Adversaries pick up the pace in 2025

Each week brings another salvo of headlines evidencing that our electric power, water, telecommunications, hospitals, and other critical infrastructure are being continuously compromised. These adversaries are brazenly prepositioning themselves within these networks to inflict physical harm upon the American people and insight societal panic, division, and chaos at a time and place of their choosing.

Last week, just days after Plankey’s name was excluded from a group of 88 nominees packaged together for a Senate confirmation vote, FBI and CISA officials disclosed new revelations on how Russian-affiliated threat actors are threatening U.S. water, agriculture, and energy critical infrastructure providers.

The Justice Department also unveiled indictments against a Ukrainian national supporting Russian state-affiliated cybercriminal groups in their efforts to tamper with US water systems.

These events round out quite a lineup of such cyber revelations for 2025, a year that began with newly-discovered details on the Chinese government’s Volt Typhoon operational technology (OT) infiltrations and Salt Typhoon compromises of the nation’s largest telecommunications and digital service providers. The year proceeded to surface new intrusions into financial services, hospitals, and manufacturing firms.

A country that cannot protect the mobile phone communications of its top leaders, its financial transactions, health services, capacity to build things, or its water and power cannot seriously claim to be on top of its national security, let alone pass on to its children any degree of security and self-determination. Yet, here we are at the close of 2025.

Why we need a leader at CISA

CISA owns the essential national security mission of protecting the homeland from society-crippling cyberattacks, including threats to the digital infrastructure of the defense industrial base (DIB) and the nation’s critical infrastructure. This includes the chemical industry, commercial facilities, telecommunications, critical manufacturing, dams and waterways, emergency services, electric and fossil fuel energy, financial services, food and agriculture, government facilities, information technology infrastructure, healthcare and public health, nuclear power infrastructure, transportation systems, and water and waste water systems.

Sean Cairncross has taken the lead at the Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD). Alexei Bulazel has taken the cyber lead at the National Security Council (NSC). And, Kirsten Davies has been finally confirmed as chief information officer at the Department of War.

But the team of experienced professionals at CISA still await their director.

While we wouldn’t ask the U.S. Marines to execute their missions without a leader, CISA’s unique and specific homeland security mission to block and deter our cyber adversaries has been left leaderless at this urgent moment of need, and with so much work ahead in the coming months and years.

The Trump administration continues to brief industry partners on its National Cybersecurity Strategy, due out in early January 2026. National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross has previewed “six pillars” of policy action, including cyber offense and deterrence, regulatory realignment, cyber workforce development, federal procurement, critical infrastructure protection, and emerging technology innovation. Cairncross has said that the president will promptly follow-up on the strategy release with executive orders (EOs) officially putting the document into action.

The strategy prioritizes stronger partnerships between the government and private sector in a number of areas of collaborative opportunity, and the administration has been open to new and creative ideas for leveraging the greatest unique strengths of government and industry for a stronger national cyber defense. 

Given the undeniable aggressiveness of our adversaries, the nation cannot afford legislative or bureaucratic paralysis at a time of overdue action and urgency. There should be no greater priority for those charged with our national security than resolving this impasse and delivering to CISA the qualified, experienced, empowered leader the agency and our country deserves.

Bob Ackerman, chairman, Global Cyber Innovation Summit, co-founder, DataTribe

SC Media Perspectives columns are written by a trusted community of SC Media cybersecurity subject matter experts. Each contribution has a goal of bringing a unique voice to important cybersecurity topics. Content strives to be of the highest quality, objective and non-commercial.