An agency infamous for its role in the Biden-era censorship cartel is in for massive workforce reductions.
Amidst the federal government lockdown and the Trump administration’s reductions in force (RIFs), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is undergoing significant upheaval. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson confirmed to tech news outlet Metacurity that the nearly 200 CISA firings will be followed by even greater reductions. This would be major accountability for an agency deeply involved in coordinating online censorship of Americans.
CISA’s parent agency, the DHS, stated to Metacurity that “RIFs will be occurring at CISA. During the last administration, CISA was focused on censorship, branding, and electioneering. This is part of getting CISA back on mission.”
Metacurity cited unnamed “sources” to set the number of firings at 176, as of Monday. The New York Post also cited unnamed sources but reported that the cuts will be even more dramatic. Out of CISA’s 2,540 employees, the agency aimed to retain only 889, furloughing the rest during the shutdown, the NY Post stated. This would constitute a 65 percent workforce cut.
As the DHS statement indicated, these huge cuts come in response to CISA’s aggressive anti-free speech activism under the Biden administration.
As MRC highlighted in a report detailing 57 censorship initiatives of the Biden administration, CISA was at the forefront of collaborating with social media companies to crush free speech. For example, CISA formed the Election Integrity Partnership in 2020, which brought together social media companies, academics, and government officials to coordinate mass election censorship (Initiative 23).
Furthermore, in 2020, CISA encouraged local election officials to flag social media posts of which the local officials disapproved. CISA then sent those complaints to Big Tech companies (Initiative 4). Even worse, CISA was part of a Biden administration effort to implement censorship policies in America modeled on U.K. policies, with the help of the U.K. Counter Disinformation Unit, a foreign government censorship agency (Initiative 2).
Also under Biden, CISA, among other agencies, formed “industry working groups” with Big Tech platforms, providing a forum for government officials to pressure platforms to censor certain speech (Initiative 31).
Free speech is under attack! Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
