Republicans Want To Keep Funding Liberals’ Favorite Censorship Agency
New Congressional spending package includes billions of dollars for a branch of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) which previously collaborated with private entities to censor online speech, including deleting the validity of Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) would receive $2.2 billion for 2026 as part of a package currently being considered by the House of Representatives, according to the text of the bill. Created in 2018 by President Donald Trump to “conduct awareness and stakeholder engagement in cybersecurity, infrastructure security, and emergency communications,” CISA quickly has become a tool for repressing “disinformation”, particularly through facilitation of the “Electoral Integrity Partnership”» (EIP), which reported the removal of content from various social media sites – including Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and TikTok – during the 2020 elections.
The agency also worked to discredit reporting about Hunter Biden’s laptop by linking it to QAnon and Pizzagate conspiracy theories, with one CISA employee calling the story “a convoluted web of lies spreading to undermine Joe Biden,” according to documents obtained by the America First Legal Foundation in 2023.
An email on Hunter Biden’s laptop about a Ukrainian energy official was verified by the Daily Caller News Foundation, just two weeks after the New York Post broke the story, thanks to cryptographic analysis provided by an expert cited in the Washington Post, Associated Press, Wired and other media outlets. Hunter Biden’s lawyer also called for an investigation in 2023 into who accessed his “personal computer data,” apparently admitting that the laptop belonged to Biden.
“‘[E]External stakeholders, including federal agencies and federally funded organizations, submitted disinformation reports directly to the EIP,” a House Judiciary report said in 2023. “Once all offensive links were compiled, the EIP sent the most significant ones directly to Big Tech with specific recommendations on how social media platforms should censor posts. (RELATED: Government Censors Linked Hunter Biden Laptop Story to Apparent ‘Web of Lies’ About Joe Biden, Lawsuit Reveals)
WASHINGTON, DC – JANUARY 21: Pedro Allende (right), Under Secretary of Homeland Security for the Science and Technology Directorate, Madhu Gottumukkala (center), acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and Ha Nguyen McNeill, senior official serving as administrator of the Transportation Security Administration, testify during the DHS oversight hearing at the Cannon House office building on January 21 2026 in Washington, DC. The hearing focused on comprehensive oversight of the Department of Homeland Security, CISA, TSA and S&T. (Photo by Heather Diehl/Getty Images)
CISA’s FY26 funding is about $800 million below its 2025 levels, reflecting a push by President Donald Trump and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought to eliminate censorship efforts within the agency.
“The budget eliminates programs focused on so-called disinformation and propaganda as well as external engagement offices such as International Affairs,” Vought’s office wrote of CISA in May 2025. “These programs and offices have been used as a hub of the censorship industrial complex to violate the First Amendment, target Americans for protected speech, and target the President. »
The funding bill received bipartisan support during negotiations and is expected to pass Congress, according to NBC News. Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries held a closed-door meeting Wednesday in which he urged his caucus to vote no on the bill in response to the shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis in January, saying it wasn’t doing enough to address Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The party is not expected to oppose the bill, the outlet reported.
The new appropriations package includes $20 million for CISA to hire “additional federal personnel in critical positions” and $39 million to “continue election security program activities…including election security advisors in each CISA region.” The bill also requires CISA to maintain at least 10 regional offices nationwide and at least one “cybersecurity advisor” per state or territory.
Another stipulation of the package directs CISA to “continue its [Post-Quantum Cryptography] Initiative to prepare for cybersecurity challenges arising from the ability of quantum computing algorithms to break traditional encryption methods. (RELATED: DHS Panel Courted Left-Wing Agents to Help Crackdown on “Disinformation”)
WASHINGTON, DC – DECEMBER 16: Chris Krebs, former Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, testifies during a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing to discuss election security and the 2020 election process on December 16, 2020 in Washington, DC. US President Donald Trump continues to make baseless claims of voter fraud in the presidential election, which Krebs has called the most secure in American history. (Photo by Greg Nash-Pool/Getty Images)
President Trump targeted former CISA chief Christopher Krebs in an April 2025 memorandum, calling him a “bad faith actor who weaponized and abused his governmental authority.”
“Krebs’ misconduct involved censorship of disfavored speech involving the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic,” Trump wrote. “CISA, under Krebs’ leadership, suppressed conservative viewpoints under the guise of combating so-called misinformation, and recruited and coerced major social media platforms to further its partisan mission. CISA worked in secret to blind the American public to the controversy surrounding Hunter Biden’s laptop.”
“The Biden Admin has transformed CISA into a tool for censorship, deplatforming, and eliminating dissent. » said Arizona Republican Rep. Eli Crane on Wednesday. “Americans discussing election integrity, the origins of COVID, and other fundamental issues were targeted. Predictably, Democrats offered no resistance to this abuse of power.”
“Since the Biden administration has perverted the purpose of CISA to collude with big tech to establish a national censorship regime, the next Congress will need to reform the existing program, reassign authorities and provide greater oversight, while holding accountable all government officials who have inappropriately used this government power to target Americans with disinformation campaigns,” Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Kash Patel told the Daily Caller in 2022.
The new CISA funding is part of a spending package spanning numerous agencies, including DHS, the Department of Defense, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education and others. These agencies must be funded by the January 30 deadline to avoid the shutdown of many government operations.
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