Former Trump CISA leader slams current state of play as “hot mess”
Donald Trump has already entered the second year of his presidency, but the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) still doesn’t have a permanent boss. One of the former ones has something to say about it – and it’s bad.
In an interview with POLITICO, Bridget Bean – who headed CISA in the early months of Trump’s second administration – said that the lack of Senate-confirmed leadership at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is paralyzing the department’s ability to execute the president’s priorities.
As a reminder, CISA is an operational component of the DHS, established in 2018 and also known as America’s “cyber defense agency.”
“I am really concerned about the lack of permanent, confirmed people,” Bean said in her first interview since retiring from government late last year.
“You’ve got to get leaders in there. Having officials confirmed by the Senate is very different than someone in an acting capacity who is serving in the role. It’s not the same.”
A few months earlier, Bean called DHS’s leadership crisis “a hot mess” in a Signal group chat, later shown to POLITICO.
Even now, CISA only has an acting director, Madhu Gottumukkala, who has already been involved in several scandals, failing a counterintelligence polygraph exam that he himself pushed to take, and uploading sensitive documents into the public version of ChatGPT.
To be fair, Trump nominated Sean Plankey, a former National Security Council official, in March 2025 to step in as CISA permanent director, but the process in the US Senate hasn’t moved a single inch since then.
At DHS more broadly, 25 top jobs have either an acting leader or are listed as vacant, according to DHS’s leadership organizational chart.
“Getting people on board is really, really, really, really critical. Career staff continue to do the best they can to do their job, but they’re doing it perhaps without the full view and vision of what the component head wants, what DHS wants and what the president wants,” Bean said.
In her interview, Bean didn’t comment much on the major cuts to CISA over the last year, just saying that “a lot of really smart people” have left. That’s true: around one-third of the agency’s 3,000 employees were either fired or left in 2025.
At DHS more broadly, 25 top jobs have either an acting leader or are listed as vacant, according to DHS’s leadership organizational chart.
A spokesperson for DHS defended the status quo at the department, telling POLITICO that Bean’s “criticisms are clearly unfounded in reality, given the historic, record-breaking year that the department just had in the first year of this administration.”
Marci McCarthy, director of public affairs at CISA, also said that “since the beginning of this administration, CISA has turned a corner and returned to our statutory, core mission.”
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