A U.S. Senate committee in New York voted on Wednesday to promote President Donald Trump’s choice to head the organization responsible for protecting the country’s vital infrastructure, including electoral systems.
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted 9–6 in favor of Sean Plankey’s appointment as director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA.
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Republicans have been criticizing the agency for several of its election-related actions, and it has been facing budget and staff cuts.
In the first Trump administration, Plankey served as the National Security Council’s director for cyber strategy before becoming the senior deputy assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Energy. He retired from the U.S. Coast Guard in 2023.
He will take over an agency that has been enmeshed in partisan disputes over its proper role in countering false allegations of voting or election fraud if the Republican-controlled Senate confirms him. Since Trump began claiming widespread fraud caused his loss in the 2020 election, Republicans have lost faith in election workers and voting equipment as a result of such assertions. Most Republicans continue to hold the view that Democrat Joe Biden was not duly elected president in 2020.
CISA is responsible for safeguarding the country’s vital infrastructure, including banks, voting machines, power plants, and dams.
Both party state election officials have praised it for its efforts to safeguard those systems. Republicans, on the other hand, have harshly attacked it, saying that its attempts to combat false information on elections and the COVID-19 outbreak have crossed the line into censorship. Kristi Noem claimed the agency had veered off course during her Senate hearing in January to become secretary of homeland security.
According to CISA officials, they only collaborated with governments in 2020 to assist them in alerting social media companies to false material propagating on their networks; they never engaged in censorship. They said that the agency made no attempt to direct or pressure those businesses to take any action.
In 2024, CISA collaborated with other federal authorities to warn the public of a number of foreign disinformation campaigns surrounding the election.
Plankey was subjected to some scathing questions regarding election security during his confirmation hearing on July 24.
Plankey did not immediately respond when Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., questioned him on if the 2020 election was rigged and stolen. Rather, he claimed that his personal views were irrelevant and that he had not examined the cybersecurity of that election. He accepted that Biden had been sworn in and that the Electoral College had verified his victory.
Blumenthal went on to ask Plankey what he would do if Trump later pressured him to make a false allegation that the elections in 2026 or 2028 were rigged.
Plankey responded, “As a cybersecurity expert, these are state-run elections, Senator.” I haven’t looked at every state’s cybersecurity posture. It would be comparable to a doctor diagnosing a patient via television after seeing him on the news.
“No,” Blumenthal said. It’s similar to a doctor who sees a patient and is in charge of making the diagnosis.
The senator criticized Plankey’s responses as inadequate and charged him with eroding public trust in the electoral process.
During Trump’s second term, Plankey will also have to manage an agency that is going through structural reforms. This entails reducing personnel and resources as well as halting election security efforts while a Homeland Security review is conducted.
In light of the anticipated multimillion-dollar budget cuts and staff departures, Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., questioned Plankey about how he would guarantee the agency’s legislative duties are fulfilled.
The nominee commended the agency’s employees’ cybersecurity skills and stated that he had learned from his leadership experience to let the operators work. He promised to restructure CISA or request additional funding if necessary.
Plankey’s move coincides with several letters to CISA leadership from leading Democrats on the House and Senate election oversight committees asking for updates on the agency’s workforce reductions and election infrastructure support initiatives. There has been no answer from them.
Earlier this year, Trump issued an executive order instructing the U.S. Justice Department to look into the case of former CISA chief Chris Krebs and revoke his security clearances. After Krebs maintained that the 2020 election was safe and that the ballot counts were correct, Trump became enraged with him.
