Dive Brief:
- Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., introduced legislation last week that would restore federal support for the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center, a longstanding program that provided free and low-cost cybersecurity resources to state and local governments before the Donald Trump administration cut funding for it last year.
- The Guaranteeing Universal Access to Cybersecurity Act proposes to restore and expand local governments’ access to MS-ISAC and authorize $50 million in federal funding annually to support the program.
- City and county leaders say the MS-ISAC program is “critical” to their cybersecurity operations.
Dive Insight:
Local governments are facing a barrage of increasingly sophisticated cybersecurity attacks, with some experts attributing the surge to the increasing prevalence of AI.
State CIOs say they are less confident about their ability to protect public-sector data from the growing cyber threats.
Last year, in the midst of a federal government overhaul, the Trump administration cut federal financial support for the decades-old MS-ISAC program and prohibited local governments from using any federal funding for the program.
MS-ISAC, run by the Center for Internet Security, an independent nonprofit, began operating as a fee-based membership service after federal support ended last September. The Guaranteeing Universal Access to Cybersecurity Act would task the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency with entering into an agreement with CIS to provide no-cost cybersecurity services, intelligence collection and technical assistance to states and local governments.
MS-ISAC provided cybersecurity resources to more than 18,000 state and local governments as of last year, with a fiscal 2025 operating budget of $27 million. In 2024, it detected and prevented nearly 60,000 malware and ransomware attacks on local governments, according to the Center for Internet Security.
