At this very moment, nation-state actors and opportunistic criminals are looking for any way to target Americans and undermine our national security.
Their battlefield of choice is cyberspace.
Cybersecurity is the preeminent challenge of our time, and threats to our networks impact far more than just our data––they impact the resilience of our communities, the continuity of our economy, and the security of our homeland.
Widespread cyber intrusions by Salt Typhoon and Volt Typhoon continue to demonstrate the Chinese Communist Party’s unrelenting quest to steal intellectual property, surveil government officials, and pre-position themselves in our nation’s critical infrastructure to disrupt our way of life at a time of their choosing. Russia, Iran, and North Korea are also probing for vulnerabilities to exploit in our networks.
Any cyberattack can cascade across the essential services that Americans rely on every day—from our airports and hospitals to water treatment facilities, internet providers, and financial systems. Making America cyber strong is not a challenge for one agency or one sector. It is a whole-of-society mission.
As chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, I will work with the Trump administration to ensure our nation’s risk advisor, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), succeeds in its core mission of protecting federal civilian networks and the critical infrastructure that supports our daily lives.
The private sector owns or operates most of this infrastructure, and it is no surprise that cyberattacks against these services rose more than 30 percent from 2023 to 2024. Addressing these heightened threats requires more than reactive measures. It demands a proactive cybersecurity posture built on continuous collaboration between the government and industry.
The Trump administration and Congress must ensure the private sector has a true seat at the table as we chart a course for long-term cyber resilience. Priorities should include preserving strong information sharing, reducing the duplicative and conflicting government compliance standards on businesses, bolstering the cyber workforce, supporting our state, local, tribal, and territorial government entities, and safely harnessing emerging technologies to enhance the capabilities of our cyber defenders.
These solutions require urgency, but as Cybersecurity Awareness Month comes to a close, the government shutdown has also allowed for important cybersecurity tools to lapse. This lapse is undermining the important public-private sector relationship that underpins our collective defense.
For the last decade, the Cybersecurity and Information Sharing Act of 2015 provided an essential foundation for this partnership. The law enables industry to have honest and sensitive conversations with the federal government, and each other, about the threats facing our networks. This framework also protects the privacy and civil liberties of American citizens when cyber threat information is shared. There has been a tangible impact from these authorities: without this law, we would not know about threat actors, such as Salt Typhoon, compromising our privately-owned critical infrastructure systems. Senate Democrats must pass the House Republican clean continuing resolution to reopen the government and extend this critical authority. Then we must find a longer-term solution to preserve this cybersecurity tool while ensuring it remains relevant to the threat landscape.
As America’s cyber professionals face heightened threats, they also face increased federal compliance standards. According to testimony before the House Committee on Homeland Security, which I now chair, “bank Chief Information Security Officers now spend 30-50 percent of their time on compliance and examiner management. The cyber teams they oversee spend as much as 70 percent of their time on those same functions.”
Our cyber regulatory regime should incentivize meaningful security improvements and facilitate actionable information sharing. It cannot be designed in a way that drains resources or slows the ability of companies to respond to fast-moving threats. This year, the average cost of a data breach in the United States reached $10 million, roughly double that of the global average. The exorbitant cost is, in part, due to U.S. cyber regulatory costs.
Congress, in partnership with CISA and the National Cyber Director, must help harmonize duplicative and vague cybersecurity regulations across the federal government so cyber professionals spend less time on paperwork and more time doing what they do best: defending our networks.
Keeping our cyber defenders focused on our networks is vital, especially considering we already face a gap of 500,000 skilled professionals in our current workforce. Closing this gap and building a pipeline of highly skilled professionals across both public and private sectors is essential to meeting the nation’s security needs.
Where that gap persists, artificial intelligence (AI) can serve as a force multiplier for our cyber defenders. We have already seen how AI can significantly enhance threat hunting, response times, and pattern recognition in our networks. But adversaries, like China, are also investing heavily in AI to enhance their own offensive cyber operations, including attempts to compromise or weaponize AI models. That reality makes it crucial that security and safety considerations are built into every stage of AI’s development, deployment, and use.
At the same time, the federal government must avoid reactive and scattershot regulation as our nation’s AI innovators work to win the global AI race. It is important for Congress, the Department of Homeland Security, interagency partners, and the private sector to work together to ensure that we don’t fall behind our adversaries in AI innovation while safeguarding our national security and civil liberties.
Accomplishing any of these goals will depend on mutual trust and collective effort. With a new administration dedicated to restoring accountability in government, we must seize this opportunity to help rebuild Americans’ confidence in the federal cybersecurity and resilience mission.
Cybersecurity remains vital for the safety, security, and prosperity of the American people. We must decide the future of our national cyber defense before our adversaries decide it for us.
Rep. Andrew Garbarino has represented New York’s Second Congressional District in Congress since 2021. He serves as chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, and also serves on the House Ethics and House Financial Services Committees.
