The government shutdown has done what our enemies could only hope for: it has hollowed out America’s cyber defenses at a moment of rising global threats. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — our frontline guard for the electric grid, water systems, and other critical infrastructure — is operating with only a sliver of its workforce while Congress plays chicken with the country’s safety.
Internal documents show CISA will retain roughly 889 employees out of a workforce that was already trimmed earlier this year, meaning roughly two-thirds have been sidelined by the funding lapse. That kind of mass furlough isn’t a technicality; it’s a clear and present danger when boots-on-the-ground analysts and incident responders are taken off the field.
To make matters worse, a decade-old legal framework that encouraged private companies to share cyberthreat information with the government has lapsed in the shutdown, removing the legal protections that made voluntary sharing possible. With that shield gone, expect companies to pull back from cooperating — exactly the opposite of what a sensible national-security posture would demand in the face of nation-state actors.
Meanwhile, adversaries aren’t pausing to let our politicians sort their pet disputes; warnings of increased Chinese state-linked intrusions and persistent ransomware campaigns are piling up as the nation’s capacity to respond is diminished. This is not abstract technobabble — it’s the reality of foreign powers probing and attacking critical systems while American response teams are furloughed and legally hamstrung.
The practical fallout will be felt by real people and businesses: slower incident response, reduced threat hunting, and a chilling effect on information-sharing that underpins public-private defense. Experienced cyber workers aren’t virtual widgets; lost training time and severed collaboration leave younger analysts without mentors and the whole construct weaker, handing opportunistic hackers a bigger opening.
This crisis is the predictable result of Washington’s refusal to treat national security as nonpartisan. When lawmakers allow critical cyber protections to expire and play political games that furlough defenders, they are choosing theater over safety — and that choice will cost Americans in the form of outages, theft, and economic damage. Congress must act immediately to restore funding and reauthorize the information-sharing protections so our cyber warriors can do their job; anything less is an abdication of duty.
