Discretionary budget seeks to eliminate CISA group, shift funds to border

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Trump administration's relentless assault on purported waste spending is looking to curtail the efforts of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) with its recently proposed 2025 discretionary budget.

In a statement released on May 2, 2025, the White House declared that its budget would reduce non-defense discretionary spending by $163 billion, shifting those funds to defense and border security, as well as support for air and rail safety. On the chopping block: the Arts, education, social programs, science and medical research, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s own CISA disinformation offices.

“The Budget ends the previous Administration’s weaponization of the Government by eliminating programs like the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s disinformation offices that targeted and censored Americans, eliminating so-called Fair Housing programs that waged war on America’s suburbs, ending the Environmental Protection Agency’s unfair harassment of citizens over ‘environmental justice’ directives, and halting the ATF’s criminalizing of gun-owning Americans and instead, focusing on stopping illegal firearms traffickers and violent gang members,” the White House offered in a statement.

The actions haven’t sat well with some members of congress including Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) who gave U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem a dressing down as a ranking member of the U.S. Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security during a recent subcommittee meeting.  

“Your agency acts as if laws don’t matter,” Murphy said addressing Noem. “As if the election gave you some mandate to violate the constitution and the laws passed by this congress. It did not give you that mandate.”

He continued, “Let’s start with your spending: You are on track to trigger the Antideficiency Act, that means you’re going to spend more money than you have been allocated by Congress. This is a rare occurrence and it is wildly illegal. Your agency will  be broke by July, over two months before the end of the fiscal year. You man not think that Congress has provided enough money to ICE, but the Constitution and the federal law does not allow you to spend more money than you have been given, or to invent money, and this obsession with spending at the border, as the chairwoman mentioned, has left the country unprotected elsewhere. The security threats to the United States are higher, not lower than before Trump came to office. To fund the border you have illegally gutted spending for cybersecurity. As we speak, Russian and Chinese hackers are having a field day attacking our nation.”

On May 10, 2025, President Trump called for 20,000 new ICE officers to enforce the administrations deportation policies. The president did not volunteer any information on how the increased staffing would be funded.

The full budget proposal from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) can be found online at www.whitehouse.gov.