At midnight on September 30, the United States government shut down for the first time since 2018, when Donald Trump suspended all non-essential government operations for 35 days unless Congress agreed to fund the border wall.
This government shutdown has even more serious implications for the cybersecurity of the US federal government than the previous one, as it comes after significant cybersecurity spending cuts implemented by the administration.
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Since July, Trump has cut $1.23 billion in cybersecurity funding to civil services and laid off about 1,000 employees at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), weakening the federal government’s ability to detect and deter cyberthreats. Even without reduced cybersecurity spending, a government shutdown never bodes well for national security.
During a U.S. government shutdown, employees deemed nonessential are typically laid off, ordered to stay home, and absent from work. Typically, these employees are paid for time not worked during the shutdown once a deal is reached in Congress to end it. Employees deemed essential, who are exempt or exempt from work restrictions, are typically required to work.
Like non-essential employees, they will also be paid for time worked during the shutdown once a deal is reached to reopen the government. This time, however, there is an unexpected factor: The White House wants to lay off government employees en masse during the shutdown, not just temporarily lay them off, in order to thin the ranks of government workers with less resistance.
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If the administration follows through on this threat, the impact of this government shutdown would be unparalleled in U.S. history. Regardless of these layoffs, government agencies have issued contingency plans for how they will deal with the reduced workforce.
CISA, for example, said it plans to keep only 889 exempt employees out of its 2,540 employees. For the Department of Defense, or the Department of War as it has been renamed by the Trump administration, its contingency plan designates intelligence work that directly supports active military operations, threat monitoring or other national emergencies as exempt and will continue uninterrupted if funding is cut.
Most intelligence agencies, like the NSA, do not make publicly available contingency plans. The impact on cybersecurity workers is difficult to predict. Since cybersecurity professionals are scattered throughout the government, the impact on their overall employment during an outage is difficult to track or predict.
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While it is difficult to quantify the impact of the outage on cybersecurity workers and contractors across the government, experts speculate that nation-state adversaries are likely drafting their own contingency plans to exploit any security weaknesses or deficiencies they identify. Cybercriminals are undoubtedly also waiting for an opportunity to exploit security vulnerabilities.
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