Three breaches in three months, a workforce smaller by roughly a third since early last year, and a director’s chair that has had no Senate-confirmed occupant for nearly 22 months. On Monday evening the White House moved to fill the last of those gaps.
The nominee is Michael LoSapio, chief information security officer at Palantir, who would run the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security. He would replace Nick Andersen, who has led the agency on an acting basis. The announcement came from the White House on Nov. 9.
The choice puts a senior executive from one of the government’s most entrenched technology contractors in charge of the office that sets cybersecurity requirements for federal agencies, many of which buy from his employer. That overlap will shape a confirmation hearing before it shapes the agency.
CISA’s portfolio runs from protecting civilian federal networks to securing election infrastructure, water systems and chemical plants, work that has expanded steadily since the agency was created in 2018 out of an earlier DHS directorate. The agency distributes threat warnings and incident support, and it holds a role that is mostly advisory: it can assess, warn and coordinate, but it rarely compels.
Those levers have looked weak this autumn. The three breaches, at the Homeland Security Department, the FBI and the Pentagon, exposed gaps in the kinds of access controls and monitoring that CISA has spent years urging other agencies to adopt. They also gave lawmakers in both parties a fresh line of argument against an agency already losing people faster than it can hire.
Staffing is the part of the problem that money has not fixed. The workforce has shrunk by about a third since 2025, according to people familiar with the agency’s internal figures, as employees left for the private sector and as some programs were curtailed. An agency that inspects other agencies’ defenses needs examiners, incident responders and procurement staff; the departures have thinned all three.
The agency has also narrowed its public role. Work on election security threats and on foreign influence operations, once a visible part of its mission, has been scaled back under the current administration. That retreat has pleased some Republicans who argued the agency had strayed into speech policing, and it has alarmed state election officials who relied on its briefings.
Mr. LoSapio’s background is operational rather than political. At Palantir he oversaw the security of systems built for defense and intelligence customers, a job that involves defending infrastructure that adversaries actively probe. Whether that experience translates into running a civilian agency with a unionized workforce, a congressional appropriations cycle and 50 state partners is the question senators are likely to press.
The contractor relationship is the harder one. Palantir’s work for DHS has grown across several administrations, spanning immigration enforcement, customs and border operations and department-wide data integration. Democrats, who are about to take control of Congress, have said they intend to examine those contracts. A nominee who until recently signed off on the security of that company’s products would face questions about recusals, about how he would handle procurements involving his former employer and about whether the revolving door has become a turnstile.
Supporters of the pick make a straightforward case: an agency that has been led by acting officials for the better part of two years needs someone with a confirmed mandate, and a practitioner with a defense background is better than another caretaker. They also note that CISA’s problems are operational, and that operational experience is scarce in the candidate pool.
The arithmetic in the Senate is unforgiving. A confirmation requires floor time, and a narrow majority has limited appetite for nominations that generate headlines about conflicts of interest. Even a nominee with clean credentials can stall if a handful of senators decide the vote is not worth the trouble.
The alternative is more of the same. Acting leaders serve at the pleasure of the secretary, cannot make commitments that outlast a transition and struggle to retain senior staff who want a principal with a confirmed title. Every month without one is a month in which the agency’s authorities are exercised cautiously.
There is a narrower question that will not be settled by any hearing: whether CISA’s model of gentle persuasion works at all when the agencies it advises control their own budgets and face no penalty for ignoring it. The breaches this autumn suggest the advisory approach has limits. A new director can reorganize, hire and prioritize, but he cannot rewrite the statute that keeps his agency in an advisory role.
Mr. LoSapio would inherit a demoralized staff, a diminished budget outlook and a Congress preparing to investigate his former employer. Whether he gets the job at all may depend on how convincingly he can describe a line between the company he served and the agency he would run, a line that is easy to draw on paper and harder to hold once contracts land on the desk.
