It’s been about a month since a New York Times report introduced the political world to something called “Project 2025.” The initiative, crafted by Donald Trump’s team and its allies, is designed to “alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government.”
As part of this “sweeping expansion of presidential power,” due to be implemented after the next Inauguration Day in 2025, federal offices and agencies that currently operate with a degree of independence from White House political interference would suddenly find themselves under Trump’s direct control.
What we’re continuing to learn, however, is that under the same project, other federal offices and agencies would find that their objectives have been radically altered. ABC News reported:
Among hundreds of other changes, Project 2025’s nearly 1,000-page policy blueprint, called “Mandate for Leadership,” singles out the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, which is the arm of the Department of Homeland Security focused on guarding the nation’s critical infrastructure, including the systems used to conduct elections.
The report, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, added that the Project 2025 blueprint “recommends ending CISA’s efforts to counter the flow of mis- and disinformation.”
If the name of the agency sounds at all familiar, it’s not your imagination: CISA might’ve once been obscure, but it ultimately took on a greater political significance.
Revisiting our earlier coverage, it was the Trump administration’s Department of Homeland Security that created the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in 2018, and part of CISA’s purview was (and is) to combat misinformation and disinformation.
By any fair measure, it was a success: CISA spent much of 2020, among other things, combatting foreign interference in our elections and preventing attacks. The office was led by Christopher Krebs, who served as the nation’s top cybersecurity official, and who earned bipartisan praise for his work. The Washington Post’s David Ignatius noted after the 2020 elections, “When the history books about this election are written, Krebs will be one of the heroes.”
The day Ignatius’ column was published, Donald Trump fired Krebs. The then-president wanted CISA to go along with ridiculous lies about the 2020 elections, and when Krebs instead told the truth, he was shown the door.
Nearly three years later, Trump’s operation wants to derail CISA’s work altogether.
A larger pattern is starting to take shape. Republicans sued to stop federal officials from working with social media companies to combat misinformation; GOP officials helped derail a Department of Homeland Security initiative to counter disinformation; and as my MSNBC colleague Ja’han Jones recently noted, Republican Rep. Jim Jordan’s so-called “weaponization” panel released a report in June that also condemned efforts to combat disinformation.
It’s against this backdrop that Team Trump also wants to take a sledgehammer to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
Is that despite CISA’s successful work or because of it?