America’s main cybersecurity agency needs to be smaller and should no longer fight misinformation and disinformation, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to head the Department of Homeland Security said Friday.
In her testimony before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Republican South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem faced questions about her plans to manage DHS and its $115 billion budget for border security, immigration, emergency preparedness, and digital threats.
Noem would also have oversight of Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the leading civilian cyber authority charged with protecting troves of critical infrastructure, including government facilities, power grids, telecommunications, and election systems.
Noem’s vision for the agency aligns with that of GOP figures who contend the agency has for years tried to censor right-leaning viewpoints online. [Editor’s note: Several studies have refuted this contention.]
“CISA’s gotten far off-mission. They’re using their resources in ways that was never intended,” she told Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., the committee’s ranking member.
“The misinformation and disinformation that they have stubbed their toe into and meddled with should be refocused onto what their job is, and that is to support critical infrastructure…to have the resources and be prepared for those cyberattacks that they will face,” she said, calling out recent Chinese penetrations of telecom networks and other critical infrastructure systems.
“CISA needs to be much more effective, smaller, more nimble, to really fulfill their mission, which is to hunt and to help harden our nation’s critical infrastructure,” she said.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and leading into the 2020 election, the agency had regular contact with social media platforms to inform them of misinformation or disinformation attempts from foreign adversaries or other home-grown entities.
But the agency began reducing its communications after the 2022 midterms, following a July 2023 Missouri-originated lawsuit alleging that the Biden administration’s efforts to flag disinformation violated First Amendment rights and suppressed politically conservative voices.
Many of those views centered around COVID-vaccine efficacy, as well as Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud. The case was kicked up to the Supreme Court, which ultimately sided with the Biden administration on the matter last year.
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., the panel’s new chairman, has said he would seek to scale back CISA or remove it as an agency altogether. He would likely face challenges doing so, given the agency’s generally bipartisan support the agency has had since it was established in 2018 during Trump’s first term.
Paul expressed interest in working with Noem to prevent DHS staff from being sent to speak with social-media companies on matters pertaining to constitutionally-protected free speech.
She agreed, saying the department should “not be in the misinformation and disinformation space like the current DHS is.”
Last week, Meta said it would end its fact-checking programs and move to a Community Notes-style model akin to that of Elon Musk’s X, formerly known as Twitter. That decision has been viewed largely as a conservative effort to frame misinformation takedowns as censorship.
In testimony, Noem made clear she supports cybersecurity investments, touting her state of South Dakota as a major hub for cyber research. But she has previously expressed caution about federal cyber programs. She turned down $7 million worth of grants from CISA meant to help strengthen the cybersecurity posture of her own state.
Asked by Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., about why she turned it down, Noem said “the requirements of that grant would have caused me to grow my state government.”
“The administration costs of it would have been much more than would have been able to facilitate at the local level, and our state was already proactively helping these individuals that needed the resources to secure their systems,” she argued.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., also renewed criticisms of the Biden administration’s effort to create a Disinformation Governance Board within DHS tasked with countering false and misleading information online. It was pilloried by Republican lawmakers over questions about its constitutionality and perceived censorship mission.
The board was paused after just three weeks of operation in May 2022 and was later disbanded by outgoing DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas that August.
Noem said “no board like that will exist under my leadership” and agreed with Hawley’s stated concerns about government overreach — similar to what some Republicans have lobbed at CISA over the agency’s election security efforts.
Noem is a four-term congresswoman who was first elected governor of South Dakota in 2018, becoming the state’s first female executive. She has been a stalwart Trump supporter in recent years, appearing with the incoming president at multiple rallies across the country.
She was reportedly on Trump’s shortlist for vice president but fell out of favor after she received criticism for a memoir that included dubious foreign policy claims and a story about shooting her family’s 14-month-old puppy because of unruly behavior.
In announcing her nomination, Trump said that Noem “has been very strong on border security,” citing the fact that she sent the South Dakota National Guard to the U.S.-Mexico border multiple times to prevent illegal border crossings.
Her role might be more limited than previous secretaries, however, as Trump also said that she “will work closely with ‘Border Czar’ Tom Homan to secure the border.” Stephen Miller, a senior adviser to Trump during his first administration, is also poised to take on an expanded role as homeland security advisor and White House deputy chief of staff for policy.
Noem also said she would end Customs and Border Protection’s mobile application, CBP One, on her first day as DHS secretary. The app was launched in October 2020 to provide streamlined access to customs services and was expanded in January 2023 to provide migrants with the ability to schedule appointments at select U.S. ports of entry.
“There’s data and information in there that we will preserve so that we can ensure we know who’s coming into this country and who’s already here that we need to go find,” she said.
It is unclear, however, the extent of data that the incoming administration would be able to extricate from the app.
A privacy impact assessment released by CBP in October 2024 said the app as a whole “collects and stores the first and last name of the user as part of the profile creation” and that “this information is stored locally on the mobile device or within web storage to create a user profile within CBP One so that the user can quickly retrieve information for subsequent uses.”
Lawmakers also raised concerns about the need for DHS to invest in detection capabilities, both to better identify the flow of illegal narcotics coming into the country and to detect illegal migrant crossings at the northern and southern borders.
Noem said better technologies were needed at ports of entry, including the use of scanners and surveillance operations that could enhance current security practices.
“There’s new technologies out there to cooperate with satellites in some areas where the topography does not necessarily facilitate having actual infrastructure,” she said.
After the hearing, Peters told Nextgov/FCW that there are some expected “differences of opinion” on Noem’s cyber and disinformation policy approaches going forward.
“I believe that we need to strengthen our cybersecurity efforts in this country, and we need to provide more resources to make CISA even more effective in dealing with cyber threats and working with private industry, critical infrastructure and other key stakeholders in order to strengthen our cybersecurity so they play a very important role,” he said. “I’m going to continue to press to make sure that they can continue that role, and if Governor Noem is confirmed, I will work with her as secretary and continue to work with [Chairman] Paul to attempt to advance that agenda.”
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