The Trump administration's FY27 budget proposal, published on 7 April 2026, proposes cutting the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) by $707 million, eliminating 860 positions and bringing the agency's operating budget to roughly $2 billion1. The counter-ransomware initiative, which coordinated federal response to incidents including the 2021 Colonial Pipeline attack, had already been cancelled under earlier reductions. CISA lost roughly one-third of its staff through 2025-2026 cuts before the FY27 number landed. The FBI's cybercrime obligations would fall a further $560 million, with around 1,900 FBI staff affected across cyber and adjacent portfolios.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the US federal standards body for measurement and technology, is also inside the cuts envelope. NIST maintains the vulnerability-scoring baselines, Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) enrichment and Software Bill of Materials work the private sector relies on to run any modern patch-management programme. Stripping budget from NIST at the same time as CISA removes both the agency that publishes the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) deadlines and the agency that scores the CVEs those deadlines attach to.
The budget proposal is not law; Congressional appropriations can modify or reject it through markup and committee amendments. But the direction of travel is already set by prior reductions that cleared the appropriations process. For US private-sector Chief Information Security Officers, the federal KEV deadlines issued in April, CitrixBleed 3, the F5 reclassification, the 17-year-old Office bug, are now scheduled to be enforced by an agency with one-third fewer staff. The UK and EU, moving the opposite way on cyber regulation, are widening the transatlantic policy gap at exactly the point the threat cadence is tightest.
