A new Congressional spending package includes billions of dollars for an arm of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that previously collaborated with private entities to censor online speech, including suppression of the validity of Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) would receive $2.2 billion for 2026 funding as part of a package currently being considered by the House of Representatives, according to the bill’s text. Created in 2018 by President Donald Trump to “carry out cybersecurity, infrastructure security, and emergency communications stakeholder outreach and engagement,” CISA quickly became a tool for cracking down on “misinformation,” including through the facilitation of the “Election Integrity Partnership” (EIP), which flagged content to be removed from various social media sites — including Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and TikTok — during the 2020 election.
The agency also worked to discredit reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop by linking it to QAnon and Pizzagate conspiracy theories, with one CISA employee calling the story a “convoluted web of falsehoods being spread to undermine Joe Biden,” according to documents obtained by the America First Legal Foundation in 2023.
One email on Hunter Biden’s laptop regarding a Ukrainian energy executive was verified by the Daily Caller News Foundation, only two weeks after the New York Post first broke the story, through a cryptographic analysis provided by an expert cited in The Washington Post, the Associated Press, Wired, and other outlets. Hunter Biden’s attorney also requested an investigation in 2023 into individuals who accessed his “personal computer data,” seemingly admitting that the laptop was Biden’s.
“‘[E]xternal stakeholders,’ including federal agencies and organizations funded by the federal government, submitted misinformation reports directly to the EIP,” said one House Judiciary report in 2023. “Once all of the offending links were compiled, the EIP sent the most significant ones directly to Big Tech with specific recommendations on how the social media platforms should censor the posts.”
CISA’s FY26 funding comes in some $800 million below its 2025 levels, reflecting a push from President Donald Trump and Office of Management and Budget Director Russel Vought to eliminate censorship efforts in the agency.
“The Budget eliminates programs focused on so-called misinformation 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 were used as a hub in the Censorship Industrial Complex to violate the First Amendment, target Americans for protected speech, and target the President.”
The funding bill received bipartisan support in negotiations and is expected to pass Congress, according to NBC News. Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries held a closed-door meeting on Wednesday where he urged his caucus to vote no on the legislation in response to the shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis in January, saying that it didn’t do enough to address Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations. The party is not expected to whip against the bill, the outlet reported.
The new appropriations package includes $20 million for CISA to hire “additional Federal staff to 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 field offices around the country and at least one “Cyber Security Advisor” per state or territory.
Another stipulation in the package directs CISA to “continue its [Post-Quantum Cryptography] Initiative to prepare for cybersecurity challenges stemming from the capability of quantum computing algorithms to break traditional encryption methods.”
President Trump targeted the former head of CISA, Christopher Krebs, in an April 2025 memorandum, calling the former director a “bad-faith actor who weaponized and abused his Government authority.”
“Krebs’ misconduct involved the censorship of disfavored speech implicating the 2020 election and COVID-19 pandemic,” Trump wrote. “CISA, under Krebs’ leadership, suppressed conservative viewpoints under the guise of combatting supposed disinformation, and recruited and coerced major social media platforms to further its partisan mission. CISA covertly worked to blind the American public to the controversy surrounding Hunter Biden’s laptop.”
“The Biden admin transformed CISA into a tool for censoring, deplatforming, and eliminating dissent,” said Republican Arizona Rep. Eli Crane on Wednesday. “Americans who discussed election integrity, the origins of COVID, and other core issues were targeted. Predictably, Democrats offered no resistance to this abuse of power.”
“Given how the Biden administration has perverted the purpose of CISA to collude with Big Tech to establish a domestic 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 used this government power improperly to target Americans with disinformation campaigns,” Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Kash Patel told the Daily Caller in 2022.
The new CISA funding comes as part of a spending package covering numerous agencies, including the DHS, the Department of Defense, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, and others. These agencies must be funded before a Jan. 30 deadline to avoid many government operations being shut down.
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