The Senate Homeland Security Committee voted 8-7 this morning to advance Sen. Markwayne Mullin’s, R-Okla., nomination to the full Senate, setting up a confirmation vote on whether he will become the next homeland security secretary after President Donald Trump ousted Kristi Noem.
Noem’s departure from her role as head of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was announced by Trump in a Truth Social post earlier this month where he also made public his nomination of Mullin.
That leadership turnover falls amid a multi-week DHS shut down, while Republicans and Democrats are locked in an appropriations standoff tied to immigration policy disputes.
While there were few mentions of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) during Mullin’s committee confirmation hearing on Wednesday – which lasted three hours and largely focused on immigration policy – the nominee did commit to ensuring the agency is sufficiently staffed.
“We’ve got to recruit the right people, the best and brightest individuals in those areas,” Mullin said in response to a question from Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., who asked how he planned to restore the CISA workforce.
“Recruiting individuals that … want to be there, that want to deliver the mission, is vitally important, and so we will work to make sure that happens,” Mullin added, pointing to the University of Tulsa as having a “great program” that CISA can recruit from.
CISA has also undergone recent workforce changes. At the leadership level, the former acting director of the agency, Madhu Gottumukkala, left his role for a different position within DHS. CISA’s now former chief information officer, Bob Costello, also announced his departure from the agency and federal service earlier this month.
Mullin’s comments on hiring “the right people,” echo those from Gottumukkala who told Congress in January that CISA was focused on acquiring “the right workforce, not a larger one, but a more capable and a skilled one.”
The latest headcount from CISA reported 2,389 agency employees – down from 3,300 in January 2025 – though that number received pushback from lawmakers who said an internal document showed much larger vacancies.
Hassan stressed during Mullin’s Wednesday confirmation hearing that those hires should be “nonpartisan experts with experience and commitment to the safety and security of our country wherever that leads them.”
Mullin said that while he was not sure what staffing numbers “the mission requires,” CISA will be “staffed adequately if we can find the right people to staff or to make sure that we’re mission capable.”