Trump’s cuts could leave the US exposed amid a heightened threat from Iran
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
By Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Adam Goldman
Soon after the United States bombed Iran’s crucial nuclear facilities, the Trump administration warned that Iran could seek revenge by inspiring violent extremists or launching cyberattacks against U.S. networks.
But many of the federal programs or resources that would defend the nation against such attacks have been scaled back significantly in recent months, after President Donald Trump slashed the federal bureaucracy and reoriented much of the national security apparatus to help with his immigration crackdown.
Trump has cut funding and specialists from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, which helps protect the nation’s power grids, elections and water utilities. In a sign of the heightened risk of a cyberattack, the FBI directed officials in recent days to assist the cybersecurity agency in protecting crucial infrastructure, according to an email obtained by The New York Times.
But that directive came after FBI officials tasked with working on cybersecurity or counterintelligence were asked to assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement on routine deportations.
The administration has also purged decades of experience at the highest ranks of the FBI, heightening concerns that the bureau might be unprepared to deal with myriad crises that the agency faces on a daily basis, let alone the possibility of Iran taking revenge on American soil.
And the administration has proposed breaking up a little-known office tasked with detecting potential chemical, biological and nuclear attacks against the United States.
“We are less safe now than we were on Jan. 20 because of the indiscriminate cuts by DOGE, that shift in priority to focus exclusively on immigration and not on counterterrorism or other national security threats, and the loss of institutional knowledge about those national security threats,” said Mary Ellen Callahan, the former assistant secretary of homeland security for the Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction office, which Trump has proposed disbanding. “We are less safe now and the risks are higher now.”
Trump’s aides maintain that his policies have restored national security to the United States by tightening its borders and pursuing sweeping deportations of immigrants in the country without legal status.
The Department of Homeland Security has been quick to publicize arrests over the weekend of 11 Iranians in the United States illegally, including one who was on a terrorism watch list. And the White House has sought to redirect attention to the Biden administration’s border policies, contending that the record number of migrants who crossed into the United States in recent years posed a significant risk to the nation.
“We’re doing everything that we can to keep our people safe,” Vice President JD Vance said Sunday. “This is one of the reasons why border security is national security, is if you let a bunch of crazy people into your country, those crazy people can eventually take action. We’re going to do everything that we can to make sure that doesn’t happen and to keep Americans safe.”
The approach by the Trump administration, however, ignores some of the more modern ways that Iran or its proxy groups could target the United States, according to national security officials.
And even though Iran and Israel have agreed to a ceasefire, national security officials warned that the nation was still exposed to retaliation from Iran or its proxies, particularly one cloaked in sensitive computer systems.
“We are not out of the woods yet in terms of what Iran will try to do as payback,” said Thomas S. Warrick, a former counterterrorism official in the Trump, Obama and Bush administrations. “But there’s a host of DHS programs that were intended to help defend the United States homeland from those attacks, and we’re going to find that many of those programs have been adversely affected.”
Trump and his allies have long held animosity for CISA, the agency he signed into law in his first term that would eventually declare the 2020 election was one of the best-run in history — undercutting Trump’s claims. In early March, Trump slashed more than $10 million in funding to two crucial cybersecurity intelligence-sharing programs that helped detect and deter cyberattacks and alerted state and local governments about forthcoming attacks on cybernetworks.
CISA has also canceled contracts that affected more than 100 cybersecurity specialists with a range of specialties. In its 2026 budget request, the administration also proposed cutting more than 1,000 positions from the agency, which is funded to hire more than 3,700 people.
At the same time, Trump is hoping to secure about $175 billion in new spending to enforce his ambitious anti-immigration agenda through his domestic policy legislation, which is still making its way through Congress. The administration has also redirected many federal agents to assist ICE for its deportation campaign, including FBI agents who have been pulled from their usual tasks of cybersecurity, counterintelligence or criminal work.
The Times reported in May that the Justice Department decided that about 2,000 of its federal agents — from the Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. Marshals Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — were required to help find and arrest immigrants lacking legal status for the remainder of the year.
But in the days since the attack on Iran, FBI officials are pivoting to address the threats posed by Iran.
“Perhaps, in hindsight, forcing out the most experienced national security senior executives, and having counterterrorism and counterintelligence agents and analysts spend their time assisting on immigration roundups, might not have been the most well-thought-out ideas,” said Michael Feinberg, a former FBI agent who spent years handling national security matters before abruptly leaving the bureau several weeks ago.
The FBI, in a statement, declined to comment on personnel decisions but said the agency does “continuously assess and realign our resources to respond to the most pressing threats to our national security and to ensure the safety of the American people.”