Future of US digital security in jeopardy due to White House attacks on science organization, officials say
If White House attempts to gut science and technology entities are successful, China will be poised to cripple U.S. communications, economic transactions, infrastructure, and even military operations, current and former government cybersecurity officials told Defense One.
Recent White House efforts to fire workers across the federal government and freeze agencies’ spending hit another roadblock Thursday when a U.S. District Court judge ruled that planned firings of probationary workers across the government are unlawful. Last week, a different judge ruled that the Trump Administration doesn’t have the authority to freeze agency funding without Congress.
But the White House is challenging both rulings, and even if the appeals fail, could potentially ignore the rulings altogether.
Proposed cuts to the National Institutes for Standards and Technology, NIST, have not received as much attention as cuts to other agencies. But cybersecurity experts and officials are worried about what a weakened NIST could mean in the future. The organization sends scientists and researchers around the world to advocate for strong cybersecurity standards for electronics and digital devices, work that would be directly affected by a travel or funding freeze.
One former senior White House official described NIST’s work both researching and advocating for standards before bodies like the International Organization for Standardization and the International Electrotechnical Commission, as “a form of technology infrastructure that’s invisible as long as it works.” They described the proposed freeze as “the kind of erosion that will show up not in the next 10 minutes, but in months and years and decades.”
One current NIST official said, “We’re in a big global race, primarily with China, but with other nations, for leadership in critical emerging technologies. The way we deliver on that is by having technical staff that understand and are developing the technologies and then can go in the international arena to battle on the standard.”
It’s the sort of work that requires more humans, not fewer, and the sort of advocacy that can’t happen remotely, they said. “If [the United States] is not in the room, then you’re giving control over to the [People’s Republic of China] to put in either bad standards or ones that have back doors or technologies that are counter to the U.S. interests.”
Another former senior White House official who worked directly on issues related to China and cybersecurity said “of course” they are concerned that the travel restrictions and firing of NIST researchers would lead to increased vulnerabilities across the future electronics space.
The current efforts represent a dramatic reversal from the first Trump administration, which coordinated an internal effort to limit the use of electronics equipment from Chinese company Huawei on the basis of core vulnerabilities that would allow Chinese military access to equipment.
Since that time, the threat has only grown. Rob Joyce, a former cybersecurity director at the NSA, told Congress last week that the spread of hackable digital technology across the civilian sector would also affect military operations, especially in the event of conflict.
“The intent of the Chinese is to disrupt our military transport capabilities to move into the theater. We would have to transport an enormous amount of people and materiel and you can imagine that the computers that plan and support the [Defense Department] both in civilian infrastructure and in the government, are an important aspect to our success in being able to mount that defense.”
The White House attacks on NIST, if they prove successful, would also hit the institute’s newly-established AI Safety Institute, a body that was established through an October 2023 executive order that established it. The cuts would hurt institute’s ability to conduct research, develop safety protocols, and collaborate with industry partners. And one of the new Administration’s first actions was to rollback the order that brought it into existence.
The current NIST official said the proposed cuts “would impact our ability to deliver on our AI mission. It would have problems across quantum information science. So there’s like all the different areas that we touch on, all of which have standards as well.”
The former senior White House official said setting and advocating for standards on AI is a critical area for the United States to focus research and advocacy on right now. “If you look at what China is doing and how it’s using AI to literally control the lives of millions of Uyghurs. If you look at the surveillance state Chinese citizens live in, that does not represent America’s core values and the ideals of the constitution,” they said.
But there’s another concern as well. As artificial intelligence enables much more effective discovery and targeting of electronics around the world, allowing devices to remain highly hackable is even more dangerous, Joyce told lawmakers.
“AI is going to make everyone faster,” he said, referring to both hackers and defenders. “It’s also going to bring new classes of vulnerabilities that we don’t appreciate yet. So that research and understanding, the adversarial testing of these systems so that we break them before the Chinese or the Russians get to break them, is going to be vital.”
That’s one reason why science centers like NIST are so important, he said. “We are entering a new era with AI that will introduce new vulnerabilities. The most important thing is we’ve got to have the connection to both industry and academia that’s looking at the new classes of vulnerabilities that are introduced by AI.”
NIST is housed under the U.S. Department of Commerce. The department did not respond to requests for comment.
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