White House Budget Proposal Would Spike Spending for Defense, Cut Major CISA and FEMA Programs
The Trump administration’s proposed fiscal budget for 2027 would increase spending to a historic $1.5 trillion for national defense, while simultaneously significantly slashing support for domestic security programs and partnerships.
The proposal summary, which was released on 3 April, includes a 44 percent increase to the federal budget, which would send another $18.5 billion to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and $10 billion to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). However, the budget would cut $707 million from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and $1.3 billion from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Those cuts would compound previous budget and staffing reductions, especially at CISA, causing notable concern among private-sector security professionals.
“You don’t cut the fire department and then wonder why buildings burn,” said Seemant Sehgal, founder and CEO of BreachLock, in a statement. “Cutting [CISA’s] budget by $707 million, on top of what’s already been cut, is a gift to every nation-state actor that’s been quietly targeting U.S. critical infrastructure.”
Among the proposed cuts to CISA is the elimination of external engagement offices. Eliminating stakeholder engagement efforts could have significant and detrimental impacts because those offices serve as a primary conduit between CISA and state, local, and private-sector partners that own or operate much of the nation’s critical infrastructure, Nextgov/FCW reported.
“Nation-state adversaries are actively and strategically exploiting weaknesses in U.S. cyber defenses, and sophisticated threat actors are targeting critical infrastructure with increasing persistence,” said Doc McConnell, head of policy and compliance for Finite State, in an emailed statement to Security Management. McConnell noted that although manufacturers are responsible for their products’ cybersecurity—including proactively spotting and fixing vulnerabilities and managing supply chain risk—“those efforts are most effective when backed by a strong government cybersecurity function.”
The elimination of stakeholder engagement programs will leave enterprise security teams for private organizations to deal with nation-state threats without the support of a centralized federal clearinghouse, according to John Carberry, a solution sleuth for cybersecurity solutions firm Xcape, Inc.
“This shift places the entire burden of national collective defense onto individual firms at a time of unprecedented geopolitical volatility,” Carberry said in an emailed statement.
Other proposed cuts to CISA include programs that target misinformation and propaganda—which the administration claimed violate the First Amendment as part of a “Censorship Industrial Complex.” Several of the programs the proposal references have already been shut down, either before Trump’s second term or during the deep cuts to CISA in 2025. The agency shuttered entire divisions and lost roughly one-third of its personnel, becoming a punching bag for the president after CISA contradicted his false claims of widespread election fraud in 2020, according to Cyberscoop.
Under the Biden administration, CISA reported that it never had censorship programs and that it ended programs focused on misinformation.
There is a significant discrepancy in the proposal about the total amount suggested being cut from CISA. While the proposal summary said $707 million, the budget’s appendix only reduced it by roughly $360 million. Regardless of which number is accurate, the cuts would still further gut the agency.
It's worth noting though, that this is only a budget proposal, not a final decision. The adminstration's requests are unlikely to be adopted wholesale by Congress, which will need to debate the next fiscal year's budget in the coming months. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have been notably uneasy about the possibility of a major spike in military spending, as well as some cuts to agencies and programs that serve the private sector, as well as individuals, The New York Times reported.
Last year, the White House sought $490 million in cuts from CISA, but resistance in Congress brought those cuts down to between $130 million and $300 million—a significant reduction in CISA's initial $3 billion budget, but not nearly as significant as originally proposed.
Other Proposed Cuts
The budget would slash $1.3 billion from FEMA, eliminating or reducing funds to the programs that the administration claims “waste funds.” One of these programs is FEMA’s Shelter and Services Program (SSP), a grant program that funds efforts to alleviate overcrowding in short-term CBP facilities. Grant recipients provide shelter, food, acute medical care, translation services, transportation, and other services to noncitizen migrants who have been released by DHS and are still waiting for immigration court proceedings.
This is not the first time the administration has targeted this program. In March 2025, FEMA sent letters to SSP grant recipients that said it would be temporarily withholding funds over concerns that the recipients were engaging in or supporting illegal activities. A month later, FEMA notified recipients that their grants were terminated. This prompted the cities of Chicago, Illinois, and Denver, Colorado, to sue the administration, and in February 2026, a U.S. district judge ruled that the administration must reimburse grant recipients. (City of Chicago v. Department of Homeland Security, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, No. 25-cv-05463, 2026)
Another FEMA program on the chopping block in the budget proposal is the Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention (TVTP) grant program. Similar to the SPP, the administration abruptly shut down the TVTP grant program last year, with a group of state attorneys general from various U.S. states filing a lawsuit against the government.
Since 2016, the TVTP program has offered grant funding for nonprofits, higher education institutions, school districts, and state, local, tribal, and territorial governments that are supporting prevention efforts against terrorism or targeted violence, such as school shootings.
“These grants enable recipients to develop sustainable, multidisciplinary TVTP capabilities in local communities, pilot innovative prevention approaches, and identify prevention best practices that can be replicated in communities across the country,” according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ grant program information website.
In the proposed 2027 budget, the administration claims that the TVTP program and similar initiatives “were weaponized to target Americans exercising their First Amendment rights.”
The proposed budget would also cut $52 million from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), pushing instead to privatize the agency’s airport screeners. Small airports would be required to participate in a screening partnership program, “under which TSA pays for private screeners at designated airports.”
