# REPORT: CISA in Freefall — DOGE Has Bled America's Digital Defense Dry

> Exactly one year ago, the teams from the Department of Government Efficiency — that instrument of brutal austerity steered by Elon Musk

- Author: Maxime Marquette
- Publisher: MadMax (https://mad-max.co)
- Section: Reportage
- Published: 2026-06-26
- Canonical URL: https://mad-max.co/en/article/reportage-cisa-en-chute-libre-doge-a-saigne-l-amerique-de-sa-defense-numerique

## Introduction: When You Dismantle the Shield, Enemy Blades Break Through

### One year after the DOGE shock: the agency that's buckling

Exactly one year ago, the teams from the **Department of Government Efficiency** — that instrument of brutal austerity steered by **Elon Musk** under the blessing of **Donald Trump** — stormed the **Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency**, better known by its acronym **CISA**. This was not a reorganization. It was a bloodletting. Seasoned agents, cyber intelligence analysts, critical infrastructure specialists: dozens were pushed out the door, to near-total indifference. We were told it was necessary. We were promised the government would be "more efficient." One year later, we are counting the wreckage.

**CISA** is today struggling to fulfill its **most basic national cybersecurity functions**. That is the conclusion drawn by observers who have closely tracked the agency's trajectory since the cuts. The personnel shortage is not a budgetary abstraction: it is an operational void, a wide-open window into American government networks, into the country's critical infrastructure. And all the while, **Russian hackers** have not been waiting.

### Russian intelligence strikes while the guard is down

On June 25, 2026, the **Security Service of Ukraine (SBU)** and the **Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)** made public a joint report: **Russian special services** had penetrated the messaging applications of officials in **Ukraine**, the **European Union**, and the **United States**. The operation deliberately targeted political figures, diplomats, and government officials. **Vladimir Putin**'s Russia has not slowed its offensive cyber operations — it has intensified them.

The coincidence is damning: at the very moment **Washington** is dismantling its cyber defense agency, **Moscow** is sharpening its intrusion tools. This is not bad luck. It is no surprise either, to anyone who has followed the repeated warnings from cybersecurity professionals since January 2025. It is the predictable result of an irresponsible policy trade-off.

*I will be direct: when you gut the staff of the agency responsible for defending a country's critical networks, and simultaneously a hostile power doubles down on its digital offensives, that is not negligence — it is abdication. America has shot itself in its digital foot, and Putin is watching the result with satisfaction.*

## The DOGE Cuts: Anatomy of a Catastrophic Decision

### A staffing freefall, missions impossible to fulfill

According to data reported by **Broadband Breakfast** on June 25, 2026, **CISA** is suffering from a persistent personnel crisis, directly linked to the **DOGE** cuts implemented since the start of the Trump administration. The agency, whose purpose is to protect the entire federal digital infrastructure of the United States, finds itself structurally understaffed to confront a threat that keeps growing. Vacant positions go unfilled. Lost expertise is not rebuilt. And the mission backlog mounts.

The **DOGE** cuts struck far beyond **CISA**. At the **Pentagon**, according to a report from the **Government Accountability Office (GAO)** relayed by **DefenseScoop** on June 23, 2026, no fewer than **82,940 civilians** left their posts between December 2024 and January 2026. A mass purge that affects the operational capacity of American defense as a whole. The numbers speak for themselves: the American military-security apparatus is now running with tens of thousands fewer personnel.

### Federal student aid staff — another collateral victim

The impact of **DOGE** is not confined to cybersecurity or the Pentagon. **Benzinga** reported on June 24, 2026, that staffing for **federal student aid programs** was cut by **40%**, jeopardizing the management of a loan portfolio reaching **1.7 trillion U.S. dollars**. This is not a simple administrative cut: it is a direct threat to the solvency of the American higher education system, to the millions of students who depend on these programs to finance their studies.

The **DOGE** logic is simple to the point of caricature: reducing the number of civil servants appears to save money in the short term, but that reduction creates hidden costs that are infinitely higher — loss of oversight, systemic vulnerabilities, cascading failure risks. Cutting **40%** of staff in a sector as critical as student aid is not a saving. It is a ticking bomb.

*There is something deeply ideological in this way of governing: the state is seen as an adversary to be neutralized, not as a collective instrument. When you cut 40% of the federal agents managing 1.7 trillion dollars in student loans, you are not making savings — you are creating the conditions for a disaster.*

## The Russian Cyber Front: Signal, Telegram, and Compromised Messaging Apps

### A systematic espionage operation against Western allies

The cyberespionage operation jointly revealed by the **SBU** and the **FBI** on June 25, 2026 is not trivial. It specifically targets the encrypted messaging apps used by **American, European, and Ukrainian officials**. These are communications that are supposed to be secure. These are diplomatic, strategic, operational exchanges. Their compromise represents a direct blow to the Western democracies' ability to coordinate their response to Russian aggression.

**Russian special services** — most likely the **FSB** and the **GRU** — exploit every available vulnerability, every weak point in their adversaries' digital defenses. They work methodically, patiently, with considerable resources. The question is not whether they will seek to exploit the void left by **DOGE** cuts at **CISA**: they already have, and they will continue.

### CISA: first line of defense, first sacrificed

**CISA** was created precisely to counter this type of operation. Its mandate? Protect America's critical infrastructure, coordinate responses to cyberattacks, share intelligence with partner agencies and the private sector. This was the architecture of America's digital resilience. The **DOGE** cuts sabotaged that architecture at the very moment the threat was reaching record levels.

The loss of qualified personnel in a cybersecurity agency is not linear. When a seasoned analyst leaves, they take with them years of threat knowledge, intelligence community networks, a nuanced understanding of adversarial tactics. Training a replacement takes years. **CISA** is not simply short on headcount: it is suffering an irreplaceable loss of human capital.

*You do not rebuild a cybersecurity team the way you top off a bank account. The expertise that walked out of CISA will not return overnight. And during the years it will take to rebuild that capacity, Russian networks will keep operating in the shadows of American systems.*

## The DOGE Paradox: Security Austerity at the Moment of Maximum Threat

### The worst possible moment to cut defenses

The timing of the **DOGE** cuts is particularly troubling. They come in a geopolitical context without precedent since the **Cold War**: **Russia** is waging a war of total aggression against **Ukraine**, permanently testing the limits of the Western response, and intensifying its hybrid destabilization operations across Europe and North America. **Putin** is not pausing. He is accelerating.

Simultaneously, **China** — another existential threat to the Western democratic order — is developing its cyber capabilities at a breathtaking pace. **Iran** and **North Korea** complete this picture of digital threats. In this context, massively reducing the capabilities of the primary American cyber defense agency is not just reckless: it is objectively an involuntary gift to America's adversaries.

### The real cost of security austerity

The savings generated by **DOGE** on **CISA** staffing are negligible compared to the cost of a successful cyberattack against a critical American infrastructure. The **Colonial Pipeline** hack of 2021 paralyzed fuel supply across the entire U.S. East Coast for several days. A similar attack against water, power, or communications systems — in a context of reduced surveillance — could have catastrophic consequences.

The short-term savings from eliminating positions at **CISA** will be infinitely surpassed by the costs of a crisis response, an emergency capacity rebuild, or worse — the direct damage caused by a successful attack that the agency no longer has the means to detect or contain. This is an accounting that the architects of **DOGE** manifestly refuse to do.

*Austerity in national security is the most expensive austerity of all. You do not see the benefit of cybersecurity agents while they are doing their job — you only see the consequences of their absence once the catastrophe has already landed. That is the perverse logic of underinvestment in digital defense.*

## Trump, DOGE, and the Doctrine of Institutional Dismantlement

### A small-government ideology applied to national security

**Donald Trump** has made dismantling the federal administrative apparatus a central pillar of his second term. **DOGE**, under **Elon Musk**'s direction, has served as the execution tool for that vision. The problem is that this "less government" ideology is applied blindly, making no distinction between genuinely superfluous bureaucracies and agencies whose mission is directly tied to national security. **CISA** falls in the second category. It was treated as if it belonged in the first.

**Trump** remains nonetheless an indispensable actor in supporting **Ukraine** and pressing **Russia**. That is the paradox of a politician who can simultaneously back **Zelensky** in public statements and weaken the American agencies that protect allies against Russian espionage. This double register is the very essence of what one might call **Trump's security doctrine**: strong in words, incoherent in deeds.

### Moderate Republicans keep their silence

What is striking about this file is the near-total absence of dissenting Republican voices on the specific question of **CISA** cuts. Several moderate Republican senators did raise their voices against other aspects of the **DOGE** cuts — particularly **Medicaid** reductions — but cybersecurity remains a political blind spot. Yet this concerns the security of every American citizen, regardless of partisan affiliation.

**CISA** is a bipartisan agency by nature, created under **Trump 1.0** in 2018, strengthened under **Biden**, recognized as essential by every national security expert. Its degradation under **Trump 2.0** represents a break with the institutional continuity that is the hallmark of a great democracy. No one in **Congress** seems willing to fight for it.

*It is unsettling that the same Republicans who wave the Russian threat as a rhetorical tool stay silent when their own decisions concretely weaken America's capacity to counter that threat. Consistency, it seems, has a limit — the limit of partisan interest.*

## American Cyber Intelligence: An Architecture Under Threat

### An interconnected ecosystem that cannot be dismantled piecemeal

**CISA** does not operate in a silo. It sits at the heart of a cyber intelligence ecosystem that includes the **FBI**, the **NSA**, **CISA** itself, the **Computer Emergency Response Teams** of various industrial sectors, and a dense network of private-sector partners. Weakening **CISA** means degrading the entire system of information sharing and coordinated response.

When the **FBI** and Ukraine's **SBU** coordinate an investigation into Russian intrusions in officials' messaging apps — as they did on June 25, 2026 — they need an operational **CISA** to relay alerts, coordinate remediation, and ensure that affected federal agencies can respond quickly. A chronically understaffed **CISA** is a weak link in that chain. And weak links, **Moscow** finds them.

### European partners watching with growing alarm

America's European allies — who cooperate closely with **CISA** within the **Five Eyes** partnerships and the **NATO** cyber intelligence-sharing mechanisms — are watching the situation unfold with deep concern. A weakened **CISA** means a reduced capacity to detect threats before they affect allies, lower-quality shared intelligence, and a strong signal to adversaries: the Western flank has vulnerabilities.

**Europe** has, for its part, massively invested in its cyber defense capabilities in recent years. **ENISA** — the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity — has seen its mandate and resources strengthened. **NATO** member states have built out their incident response teams. But without a strong American partner, the collective cyber defense architecture of the West remains exposed. **CISA** is irreplaceable in that framework.

*The West holds together through its institutions — and its institutions hold together through the women and men who work in them. When you drive them out to save pennies, you are not gaining money: you are selling our collective security by the pound.*

## The Messaging Hack: A Threat That Strikes at the Heart of Democracies

### Compromised diplomatic communications — the real stakes

The revelation that **Russian services** hacked the messaging apps of officials in **Ukraine**, the **EU**, and the **United States** is not simply a cybersecurity news item. It strikes at the very core of how democracies function in the context of hybrid warfare. When **FSB** hackers gain access to the private communications of political and diplomatic leaders, they are not just stealing data — they are stealing the West's capacity to coordinate its responses confidentially.

Ukraine support strategies, diplomatic red lines, signals of weakness or strength sent to **Moscow** — everything that passes through these compromised messaging apps potentially becomes accessible to the **Kremlin**. This is a strategic victory for **Putin**, who is using every tool available to divide and destabilize the united Western front supporting **Ukraine** against his aggression.

### Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp: no application is bulletproof

The joint **SBU-FBI** investigation points to sophisticated intrusion methods, likely through device-level attack vectors rather than flaws in the encryption protocols themselves. Russian hackers have mastered the art of exploiting mobile operating system vulnerabilities to bypass messaging encryption. Once a phone is compromised, encryption protects nothing.

Countering this type of threat requires precisely the kind of agency **CISA** is: teams capable of quickly identifying attack vectors, alerting potential targets, coordinating patches with device manufacturers and app developers. All things **CISA** does less effectively since the **DOGE** cuts. The vicious cycle is complete.

*Encrypted messaging apps are only as secure as the devices running them — and devices are only as secure as the agencies watching over their vulnerabilities. Weakening CISA means weakening the security of every American official who sends a message to an ally. That is the concrete result of the DOGE cuts.*

## The DOGE Doctrine as Seen from Moscow and Beijing

### A strategic gift handed to adversaries

National security think tank analysts harbor no illusions: the **DOGE** cuts to American security agencies are being watched with keen interest in **Moscow**, **Beijing**, **Tehran**, and **Pyongyang**. Every position cut at **CISA**, every civilian dismissed at the **Pentagon**, every surveillance program reduced is noted, analyzed, and factored into adversarial strategic calculations. The weakening of American cyber defense capabilities is not just an operational windfall: it is a political signal.

For **Putin**, the demonstration that America is willing to digitally disarm itself in the name of anti-state ideology is a narrative victory. It fuels the discourse that Western democracies are structurally incapable of defending themselves against the threats of the 21st century. For **China**, every hole in American surveillance is an opportunity to advance its own economic and technological espionage operations.

### The asymmetry of the threat: adversaries invest, America disinvests

While **CISA** was losing personnel, **Russia** was intensifying its cyber operations. While the **Pentagon** was dismissing **82,940 civilians**, **China** was steadily increasing its investment in cyber warfare capabilities. This asymmetry is fundamentally dangerous: America's adversaries have no **DOGE**. They are not dismantling their intelligence agencies in the name of budgetary efficiency. They are building, while Washington tears down.

**Admiral Samuel Paparo**, commander of **INDOPACOM**, requested **122 billion additional dollars** to strengthen American capabilities in the Pacific. That figure alone underscores the gap between the real needs of national security and the ideological approach of the **DOGE** cuts. You cannot simultaneously demand more military resources to confront **China** and gut the agencies that form America's first line of digital defense.

*Moscow and Beijing are doing a simple calculation: every American official driven out by DOGE is one fewer defender. And every fewer defender is one more opportunity. America has not simply made budget cuts — it has handed its adversaries a competitive advantage they are savoring.*

## The Institutional Response: Between Powerlessness and Ignored Alarms

### The warnings were not lacking — but no one listened

Successive **CISA** directors, cybersecurity experts, former national intelligence officials — all sounded the alarm from the first weeks of the **DOGE** cuts. Congressional hearings were held. Reports were published. Investigative articles circulated. And yet the **DOGE** machine continued its work of dismantlement, deaf to every warning.

This institutional silence in the face of alarms may be the most troubling dimension of this story. In a functioning democracy, checks and balances are supposed to prevent this kind of drift: **Congress** oversees, the press investigates, public opinion responds. In 2025–2026, these mechanisms operated in slow motion, paralyzed by political polarization and the breakneck pace of **Trump** administration actions. Too many simultaneous crises to focus attention on the silent degradation of **CISA**.

### The GAO report: belated but devastating documentation

The **Government Accountability Office (GAO)** report cited by **DefenseScoop** on June 23, 2026 provides a numbered, impartial documentation of the damage inflicted by the **DOGE** cuts at the **Pentagon**. The figure of **82,940 civilians** lost between December 2024 and January 2026 is staggering. An entire support army has disappeared — logistics specialists, analysts, technicians, lawyers, accountants, procurement specialists — everything that keeps the defense machine running day to day.

For **CISA** specifically, the precise figures have not yet been released in full, but the effects are palpable. Information-sharing programs with the private sector are suffering. Incident response capabilities have contracted. And the window between threat detection and coordinated response has widened — which, in the world of cybersecurity, can mean the difference between a contained attack and a national catastrophe.

*A GAO report comes out, documents the damage, and gathers dust on Congressional shelves. Meanwhile, Russian servers keep probing for entry points into American systems. There is a tragic irony in this sequence: we are documenting the fire while the house is still burning.*

## Critical Infrastructure: The Next Obvious Target

### Water, power, finance: the exposed sectors

**CISA**'s mission covers sixteen critical infrastructure sectors, including power grids, water distribution systems, telecommunications, financial services, and healthcare systems. Each of these sectors depends, to varying degrees, on **CISA**'s support and oversight. The degradation of that oversight capacity creates blind spots that malicious actors — state or otherwise — can exploit.

Recent precedents reveal Russia's appetite for this type of target. Attempted intrusions into American water treatment systems, attacks on European power grids, operations against Ukrainian railway infrastructure — all of this reflects a coherent strategy aimed at creating psychological and material disruption in civilian populations. **CISA** is supposed to be the last line of defense before these attacks succeed. An understaffed last line of defense is a sieve.

### The private sector left alone to face the threat

One of **CISA**'s most important functions is its role as an interface between the federal government and the private companies that operate critical infrastructure. It is often private companies that manage power grids, water distribution systems, and pipelines. They do not have the resources of a government agency to protect themselves alone. They count on **CISA** to receive real-time alerts, for technical guidance, for support during incidents.

With a **CISA** in personnel crisis, this vital link has weakened. Private companies find themselves increasingly alone against a threat that vastly exceeds their individual defensive capabilities. And in an environment where Russian and Chinese hackers have virtually unlimited national resources, fragmented defense is a recipe for failure.

*We are privatizing national security by default — not by choice, but by neglect. When the state pulls back its sentinels, companies are left on the front line, without armor and without a safety net. This is not a security policy. It is a resignation.*

## Ukraine: Laboratory of Modern Cyber Warfare

### Ukrainian lessons Washington should be heeding

**Ukraine** has been, since 2014 — and more intensely since 2022 — the testing ground of modern cyber warfare. Russian attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure — NotPetya in 2017, the power outages of 2015 and 2016, the continuous attacks on military command systems since the full invasion — have forged a Ukrainian expertise in cyber defense that is today recognized as among the best in the world.

**Ukraine** survived these attacks not only through its intrinsic resilience but also through close cooperation with Western partners — including **CISA**. **Volodymyr Zelensky**, who has transformed **Ukraine** into a model of resistance against Russian aggression, understands better than anyone the cyber dimension of this war. The question is whether **Washington** is drawing the right lessons from the Ukrainian experience, or whether it is choosing to dismantle precisely the capabilities that allowed **Kyiv** to hold the line.

### The SBU-FBI partnership: a model not to be weakened

The joint **SBU** and **FBI** disclosure on June 25, 2026, regarding Russian hacking operations is a valuable example of cyber defense cooperation. It demonstrates that despite political turbulence, security professionals on both sides of the Atlantic maintain essential cooperation channels. But this cooperation rests on solid institutions — on agencies equipped with the resources to do their work.

A weakened **CISA**, an **FBI** under tension from a politically interventionist administration, and an institutional architecture undermined by **DOGE** cuts — all of this creates the conditions for a gradual erosion of the bilateral cooperation that is the foundation of collective Western cyber defense. This is precisely the wrong moment to weaken those operational alliances.

*The SBU-FBI cooperation on the Russian messaging hack shows what intelligence professionals can accomplish when they are given the means. That is precisely the kind of partnership the DOGE cuts are threatening — quietly, but surely.*

## Prospects: Can the Trend Be Reversed?

### Rebuilding CISA — a long-haul undertaking

The question now is whether the damage is reversible. Can **CISA** be rebuilt? The answer is: yes, but not quickly, and not without political will. Reconstituting qualified cybersecurity staff takes time. Training analysts capable of confronting the sophisticated threats posed by Russian and Chinese intelligence services requires years of training and practical experience. And in a labor market where cybersecurity experts are in extreme demand from the private sector, attracting talent to the public service requires competitive salaries and attractive career prospects.

Reversing the trend would also require a political reckoning with the fact that **CISA** is not a superfluous bureaucracy but a strategic necessity. That reckoning does not yet appear to be emerging within the **Trump** administration. It could come, tragically, after a major cyberattack — when the cost of inaction has become unbearable and visible to everyone.

### Congress as the last safeguard

**Congress** has the tools to protect **CISA**: budgetary oversight, hearings, targeted legislation. Voices are rising, tentatively, to demand accountability. But the pace of Congressional investigations is tragically slow compared to the pace of the cyber threat. The urgency is of a different order: it requires swift decisions, immediate resource reallocation, and an unambiguous institutional defense of the agency.

The 2026 midterms could shift the balance of power in **Congress** and provide a political window to strengthen the mandates and budgets of national security agencies. But until then, every month that passes with an understaffed **CISA** is a month during which the door remains ajar for America's digital adversaries. And those adversaries, unlike voters, do not wait for elections.

*Democracy has its rhythms — its debates, its procedures, its elections. The cyber threat has no such constraints. It strikes when and where it chooses. The asymmetry between democratic slowness and the speed of digital attacks is the real challenge we face — and the DOGE cuts have made it dramatically worse.*

## The Information War: Disinformation and Manipulation in the DOGE Era

### Russian influence operations profiting from American institutional chaos

The institutional destabilization carried out by **DOGE** is not limited to the direct consequences on agency staffing. It also produces a formidable side effect: it feeds the **Russian influence operations** targeting American and Western public opinion. The narrative that "the American government is incompetent and corrupt" is precisely the one the **Kremlin**'s disinformation agencies broadcast continuously on social media, in online forums, and through pro-Russian media outlets.

The **DOGE** cuts to **CISA** give these influence operations tangible proof, a concrete example to amplify. "Look — America itself is destroying its cyber defense. How can it protect its allies?" That is the type of message **GRU** troll networks have been seeding in digital spaces for months. And unfortunately, the factual reality gives them an unassailable factual foundation on which to build. **Disinformation** is always most effective when it anchors itself in partial truths.

### CISA and the fight against electoral disinformation

**CISA** had also developed, under the **Biden** administration, a program to counter **digital electoral interference** — sharing information with states, detecting disinformation campaigns, protecting voting systems. This program was a particular target of conservative critics, who accused it of censorship. The **DOGE** cuts affected these capabilities as well.

As the 2026 midterms approach, the question of the security of American electoral systems is once again front and center. An understaffed **CISA** will be less capable of detecting and countering Russian interference attempts in the electoral process. **Putin**, who has every interest in influencing the composition of the American **Congress** in a direction that would weaken support for **Ukraine**, has certainly not missed this opening. The convergence of the **DOGE** cuts and the approaching elections is, at a minimum, a deeply troubling coincidence.

*It is hard not to see a cruel irony in the fact that the administration most fearful of disinformation targeting it is precisely the one that weakened the agency charged with fighting it. Paranoia can be selective — but the threat never is.*

## The Geopolitical Equation: Cybersecurity and Support for Ukraine

### A digital front extending the physical one

The war in **Ukraine** is being fought simultaneously on multiple fronts: the battlefields of the **Donbas** and **Zaporizhzhia**, the diplomatic negotiations in **Brussels** and **Washington**, and global cyberspace. The digital front is not separate from the others — it shapes them. Russian disinformation operations, intrusions into officials' communications, attacks on infrastructure: all of it is designed to exhaust Western will to support **Ukraine**.

**Zelensky** has understood this for a long time. His appeals for Western support explicitly include the cyber dimension: strengthening **Ukraine**'s ability to defend against Russian attacks on its information systems, intelligence sharing, support for rebuilding digital infrastructure. Every weakening of Western — and especially American — cyber defense capabilities also undermines **Ukraine** in this crucial dimension of the conflict.

### American credibility on the line

America's allies — and its adversaries — are watching. When the **United States** cannot protect its own officials' messaging apps against Russian hackers, its credibility as the guarantor of collective digital security takes a hit. The question is not only technical: it is strategic and political. A digitally vulnerable **America** is a less credible **America** on the world stage.

And American credibility — even reduced, even damaged by the excesses of **DOGE** and the erratic foreign policy of **Trump** — remains a foundational pillar of the Western security architecture. Preserving it, reinforcing it, defending it against the digital attacks of adversaries: that is precisely what **CISA** was created for. That is what it can no longer do properly since the cuts.

*Credibility is built over decades and destroyed in months. Every breach in American cyber defense is a message sent to the world: America is weaker than it claims to be. That message, Putin amplifies. That message, allies hear. And that message, DOGE made possible.*

## Conclusion: The Price of Strategic Myopia

### A verdict with no appeal

One year after the **DOGE** cuts to **CISA**, the verdict is unambiguous. The agency is in personnel crisis. The Russian cyber threat has intensified, with hacking operations directly targeting American, European, and Ukrainian officials. The **82,940 civilians** lost at the **Pentagon**, the **40%** of student aid staff eliminated, the reduced capacity for surveillance and incident response — all of it forms the picture of a systematic desinstitutionalization of American national security, undertaken in the name of an ideology of accounting efficiency. Efficiency has a flip side that the **DOGE** accountants refused to see: the cost of vulnerability.

The **West** cannot afford this fragility. It faces a coalition of adversaries — **Russia**, **China**, **Iran**, **North Korea** — investing massively in their digital destabilization capabilities. Meeting that threat with cuts to defense agencies means pouring water into **Putin**'s mill. **Ukraine** has been fighting for its survival for more than four years. It deserves better than allies who disarm themselves.

### The path to rebuilding

It is not too late. Democracies possess a remarkable capacity for institutional resilience when they choose to activate it. Strengthening **CISA**, rebuilding its ranks, giving it the budgetary and legal means to fulfill its mission — all of it is technically achievable. Politically, it requires a will that the **Trump** administration has not yet shown on this file. But the pressures are mounting. The warnings are multiplying. And history has shown that cybersecurity crises always ultimately get the attention they deserve — often after a major incident that could have been prevented.

The real question is not whether **CISA** will be strengthened. It is when — and at what cost. If that strengthening comes after a catastrophic cyberattack against American infrastructure or a massive intrusion into military command systems, the price will be incalculable. If action comes now, before the catastrophe — then it will still be possible to close the doors that **DOGE** left open. The clock is running. Russian hackers never stop.

*I close this report with one unshakeable conviction: democracies do not die in a single blow — they crumble, silently, when the guardians are dismissed one by one. Rebuilding CISA is not an ideological option. It is an existential necessity for a West that intends to still exist tomorrow.*

**By Maxime Marquette, columnist**

## Columnist's transparency note

### Editorial stance

I am not a journalist but a **columnist and analyst**. My expertise lies in observing and analysing the geopolitical, economic and strategic dynamics that shape our world. My work is to take political strategies apart, to understand global economic movements, to put the decisions of international actors in context and to offer analytical perspectives on the changes that are redefining our societies.

I do not claim the cold objectivity of traditional journalism, which stops at reporting facts. **I claim analytical clarity**, rigorous interpretation and a deep understanding of the complex issues that concern us all. My role is to give meaning to the facts, to place them in their historical and strategic context, and to offer a critical reading of events.

### Method and sources

This text keeps the basic distinction between **verified facts and interpretive analysis**. The rule never changes: a factual claim is published only when a verifiable source supports it, and the sources this article actually used are listed under **Sources**, never here.

**Primary source families** used by the publication, when the story has them: official statements from governments and international institutions, public statements by political leaders, reports from intergovernmental organisations, dispatches from recognised international news agencies.

**Secondary source families**: specialised publications, internationally recognised news media, analyses from established research institutions, reports from industry organisations.

When an article cites statistical, economic or geopolitical data, it comes from the institutions that produce it (intergovernmental organisations, central banks, national statistics offices), and the exact institution is named under **Sources**.

### Nature of the analysis

The analyses, interpretations and perspectives in the analytical sections of this article are a **critical, contextual synthesis** based on the information available, the trends observed and the expert comments cited in the sources consulted.

My role is to interpret these facts, to set them in the context of today's geopolitical and economic dynamics, and to give them a coherent meaning within the larger story of the changes shaping our time. These analyses reflect expertise built through continuous observation of international affairs and an understanding of the strategic mechanisms that drive global actors.

This article describes a documented state of affairs on its publication date, not a prediction: later developments may shift its outlook. No update is promised in advance; when an article is corrected or completed, the change is dated in the text.

## Sources

### Primary sources

- [Broadband Breakfast: CISA struggles over staffing one year after DOGE cuts — June 25, 2026](https://broadbandbreakfast.com/one-year-after-doge-cuts-cybersecurity-agency-struggles-over-staffing/)

- [DefenseScoop: Pentagon workforce cuts — DOGE impacts per GAO report — June 23, 2026](https://defensescoop.com/2026/06/23/pentagon-workforce-cuts-doge-impacts-gao-report/)

- [UNN: SBU and FBI expose Russian special services hacking messengers of officials in Ukraine, EU and US — June 25, 2026](https://unn.ua/en/news/sbu-and-fbi-expose-russian-special-services-hacking-messengers-of-officials-in-ukraine-eu-and-us)

### Secondary sources

- [Benzinga: Trump's DOGE cuts slashed federal student aid staff by 40% — June 24, 2026](https://www.benzinga.com/news/education/26/06/60066601/trumps-doge-cuts-slashed-federal-student-aid-staff-by-40-and-its-raising-alarms-over-americas-1-7-trillion-loan-system)

- [RBC-Ukraine: Russian hackers targeted officials across Ukraine, EU and US — June 25, 2026](https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/russian-hackers-targeted-officials-across-1782379481.html)

- [Daily Kos: The DOGE pipeline strikes again — June 24, 2026](https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/6/24/800060471/community/the-doge-pipeline-strikes-again/)

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Source: Maxime Marquette, MadMax. When citing, name the author and link https://mad-max.co/en/article/reportage-cisa-en-chute-libre-doge-a-saigne-l-amerique-de-sa-defense-numerique