Trump renominates Plankey to lead CISA
Sean Plankey, nominee to be director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, testifies during his Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee confirmation hearing in Dirksen building on Thursday, July 24, 2025. Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
The cyberdefense agency has been without a permanent director for the past year.
President Donald Trump re-nominated Sean Plankey to lead the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the White House said Tuesday, after the nomination failed to clear the full Senate at the end of last year.
Plankey’s name was listed alongside dozens of other nominees that Trump had sent to the Senate.
CISA is located within the Department of Homeland Security and is responsible for defending federal networks and critical infrastructure across the country. It’s been without a permanent leader for a year, and the office has lost around a third of its workforce under Trump 2.0 efforts to eliminate government spending waste.
The timing for Plankey’s confirmation isn’t fully clear. Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said last week that he’d block all DHS nominees until Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem commits to testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
CISA’s current acting director, Madhu Gottumukkala, is also being scrutinized by congressional Democrats after a Politico report last month showed he failed a polygraph exam that may have been wrongfully administered.
Plankey, a former Energy Department cybersecurity official in Trump’s first term, had faced multiple holds to his nomination in the Senate throughout last year, some tied to broader political disputes rather than cybersecurity policy itself.
Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., placed a hold on Plankey’s nomination last year, which involved DHS scaling down a Coast Guard cutter contract with Florida-based Eastern Shipbuilding Group, three people familiar with the matter previously told Nextgov/FCW. Plankey is currently a senior adviser in the Coast Guard.
Whoever ultimately leads CISA will do so in a midterm election year. Election matters fall under the agency’s statutory mission to protect critical infrastructure, which includes systems such as election management software and vote tabulation machines, though CISA has faced sustained GOP scrutiny in recent years over its past work monitoring and flagging online misinformation in coordination with social media companies.