Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin warned over the weekend that his agency faces sweeping staffing challenges as it seeks to rebound from a historic shutdown.
The DHS’s 76-day shutdown ended on April 30 after it set a record for the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. In the aftermath of the shutdown, which was sparked due to Democrats’ concerns about Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol, Mullin said the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency had lost over 1,000 employees due to the debacle.
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“We are also having a tremendous amount of morale issue,” the secretary said during an appearance on Fox News Sunday. “So, we had a large turnover — just in CISA, we’re down 1,100 people.”
CISA employed around 2,400 employees prior to the shutdown. It isn’t the only DHS agency facing staffing issues provoked by the shutdown. The Transportation Security Administration “was down 8%, which typically we have about a 4.6% turnover there,” Mullin said. Over 1,100 TSA officers left their jobs during the shutdown.
CISA director Nick Andersen testified in April that only 40% of CISA’s staff worked through much of the shutdown, before Mullin recalled furloughed staff in early April. Andersen said CISA’s ability to counter nation-state cyber threats amid the Iran war was “more limited than I would like,” during the April 16 hearing.
“A lot of those preparatory activities within the environment, a lot of the outreach that we would typically be able to do, that’s simply not possible or legally allowed during the period of a shutdown,” Andersen said.
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Mullin said Sunday that CISA is coming back to work to carry out “the greatest mission inside this nation.”
“They’re willing and wanting to come to work because protecting the homeland, that’s the greatest — that is literally the greatest mission inside this nation we get to do, is protect,” he said. “We’re still going to do our mission. And thank goodness we have people that believe in our mission.”
