5. Department of Homeland Security · Notable
End CISA's counter-mis/disinformation efforts
Printed page 155 5. Department of Homeland Security
“Of the utmost urgency is immediately ending CISA's counter-mis/disinformation efforts. The federal government cannot be the arbiter of truth.”
What has happened
- Partially done
The Primary the earlier pass could not reach. CISA's own Congressional Budget Justifications for FY2026 (published 2025-06-13) and FY2027 (2026-04-03) were read in full — 4,247 and 8,423 lines of extracted text. **"Misinformation", "disinformation", "MDM", "foreign influence", "influence operation", "malign" and "Rumor" appear zero times in either document.** There is no program, project or activity for countering mis- or disinformation, no line item, no positions, and no program change eliminating one — the function is not described as ended, it is simply not in CISA's budget structure at all. That is the strongest form the negative can take from the agency itself, and it is still an absence rather than a termination: no CISA or DHS statement, Federal Register notice or budget line says the mission was ended, so "immediately ending" has no dated instrument and the item stays `partial`. The single mission the budgets do name and propose to end is election security, which is #394's ask, not this one.
- Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, FY2027 Congressional Budget Justification — no mis/disinformation programme, project, activity or program change appears anywhere in the document
- Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, FY2026 Congressional Budget Justification — same, no mis/disinformation line
- Partially done
CISA's counter-mis/disinformation work was stood down in the administration's first weeks. NPR reported on 2025-02-11 that the staff working on countering foreign mis- and disinformation, together with the ten regional election security advisers, had been placed on administrative leave; ProPublica's reporting, carried by Government Executive on 2026-04-13, describes career election specialists pushed out and remaining staff avoiding election work entirely. CISA's own site now carries none of the material: the Rumor Control page, the "Rumor vs. Reality" page and the foreign influence operations and disinformation page all redirect to the general Election Security topic page, which describes cyber and physical security of election infrastructure and no counter-messaging work at all.
Research log
What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence
Research notes
Partial, not done. Two independent allowlisted outlets carry the stand-down, which is what a Status resting on Secondary evidence requires, and CISA’s own site corroborates that the material is gone. What is missing is a Primary record: no CISA or DHS statement, Federal Register notice or budget document found says the mis/disinformation program has been ended. Without that, “immediately ending” cannot be called complete - the function has no published termination, only an absence.
No Primary record was found. Searched: the Federal Register records we keep and search (no CISA-agency documents in the window), DHS’s press index, CISA’s newsroom listing, and CISA’s own topic pages.
Checked 2026-09-06: the budget justifications were reachable all along, from a different page. DHS’s budget publication page (dhs.gov/publication/dhs-budget) does stop at FY2014; the live index is dhs.gov/dhs-budget, which links a congressional budget justification page for every year from FY2015 to FY2027, each carrying one PDF per component. CISA’s are https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2025-06/25_0613_cisa_fy26-congressional-budget-justificatin.pdf (the typo is in DHS’s own filename) and https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2026-04/26_0403_ocfo-budget-cisa.pdf. Both were read; the result is the second event above.
- Action
- eliminate
- Object
- CISA counter-mis/disinformation programs
- ID
- 392