Easterly and Deputy Director Nitin Natarajan are set to leave as an administration change casts doubt on the agency’s future

By Alexandra Kelley and David DiMolfetta

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s stalwart champion and a figurehead among cybersecurity and intelligence community practitioners, Jen Easterly will leave her post Jan. 20 next year when President-elect Donald Trump is inaugurated back into the White House, people familiar with her plans said.

The plans were communicated via internal emails and an all-hands staff meeting, said the people, who asked not to be identified to share news of her departure. Deputy Director Nitin Natarajan also plans to depart at that time, one of the people said.

Easterly graduated from West Point in 1990 and later earned a master’s degree from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. She then embarked on a 20-year career in the US Army. She played a pivotal role as one of the top four officials that helped establish US Cyber Command, the combatant command born out of a 2008 Defense Department malware infestation that originated on a USB drive, resulting in a 14-month cleanup operation dubbed Buckshot Yankee.

After retiring as a lieutenant colonel, Easterly continued her government service as deputy director of the NSA for counterterrorism and then as a senior director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council under President Obama. She later transitioned to the private sector, where she served as Morgan Stanley’s global head of cybersecurity.

She was confirmed as CISA’s director after an eight-month void that had followed Trump firing Chris Krebs, the agency’s first director, when Krebs declared that the 2020 presidential election was fair and secure.

A CISA spokesperson told Nextgov/FCW that all appointees under the current administration vacate their positions when a new administration takes office and affirmed the agency’s commitment to a seamless transition.

Throughout her time, Easterly championed CISA’s Secure by Design initiatives that focused on compelling private-sector manufacturers to bake default security standards into their products and offerings at point-of-sale, as part of a broader government effort to push software makers to take their products’ security more seriously.

She headed the agency amid a slew of major cyberattacks targeting the US government, including one involving Chinese hackers that accessed the email inboxes of major US officials that later got the attention of a DHS-backed cybersecurity review board. During national election cycles, she served as a steadying voice, affirming specifically in this year’s presidential election that there was “no evidence of any malicious activity that had a material impact on the security or integrity of our election infrastructure.”

Under her direction, CISA also released guidance on emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and quantum information sciences, aiming to help entities transition their cryptography systems to a quantum-resilient standard prior to the creation of a fault-tolerant quantum computer.

It’s common for top officials to depart their posts upon a presidential transition, though some tech and cyber officials in the Biden administration already left both before and after the election transpired.

The future of CISA in an incoming Trump administration remains uncertain, as GOP allegations of censorship stemming from CISA’s interactions with social media companies — claims that Easterly has adamantly refuted — played a prominent role in a recent Supreme Court case, which the Biden administration ultimately won.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., a staunch CISA critic who has backed these censorship allegations, is also next in line to helm the top position on the Senate’s Homeland Security panel. Paul last year blocked efforts to renew CISA’s chemical security screenings after they lapsed in July 2023.

Moreover, Trump’s proposed agency budget cuts have ignited worries over whether government networks will receive adequate cybersecurity funding, Nextgov/FCW previously reported.

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose is being considered to lead the agency after Easterly leaves, Politico reported last week, citing four people who have spoken to those in his orbit.