WASHINGTON—Lawmakers are concerned that bureaucratic turf wars are complicating the federal response to cyber threats.
The issue took center stage recently as senators on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee “fretted that they had been unable to pass key cyber legislation requested by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) because of a disagreement with the Senate Intelligence Committee,” The Hill reported.
“The reality of the situation is there is conflict here,” said Chairman Ron Johnson (R-WI) at a recent hearing. “This threat is too significant to allow turf wars to get in the way of as efficient an operation as possible in terms of dealing with a very complex and serious problem.”
The dust-up illuminates the broader issue of turf wars over cybersecurity in the federal government, The Hill stated.
The executive branch has no one single agency assigned to handle cyber. Instead, authorities are spread out over various agencies, including the Justice Department, which investigates and prosecutes cybercrime, and the Pentagon and broader intelligence community, both of which handle what is considered “offensive” cyber activity.
‘Virtually Every Committee Has a Say’
While Homeland Security is broadly recognized as the main agency defending federal networks and critical national assets from cyberattacks, individual agencies also play a major role in guarding their own networks and personnel from malicious cyber actors, The Hill explained.
“The set-up means that virtually every congressional committee has a say in the federal government’s cybersecurity efforts,” The Hill said.
“On defense, the responsibilities are so spread across so many parts of the federal government and across so many congressional jurisdictions,” said Michael Sulmeyer, a former cyber policy official at the Pentagon in The Hill report. “That is very hard to get coherent policy government wide.”