Congressional appropriators this week agreed to fund the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) at $2.9 billion in fiscal year 2023, a 12 percent increase above the agency’s FY ’22 budget and 15 percent more than the Biden administration requested.
The FY ’23 Omnibus spending package, which lumps all federal departments and agencies together in a single bill, is expected to be approved by Congress this week before legislators leave for the holidays.
For the procurement accounts, funding is largely in line with the requested amounts, including $331.9 million for the continuous diagnostics and mitigation program that helps federal agencies improve situational awareness on their networks and combat cyber threats. Congress is also directing CISA to continue evaluating automated software patching to replace manual software updates to applications.
The appropriators added $1 million to the request for the National Cybersecurity Protection System, better known as EINSTEIN, raising total funding in FY ’23 to $91.2 million. EINSTEIN helps prevent cyber threats from getting into federal networks.
CISA’s threat hunting account is funded at $31 million, a $3 million increase to the request. Of the total, $28 million is for the CyberSentry program. The program allows CISA to provide commercial-off-the-shelf network intrusion detection tools on a voluntary basis to industrial control systems operated by critical infrastructure entities, giving real-time visibility into these infrastructures and bolstering defenses against cyber adversaries.
The cybersecurity portion of CISA’s operations and support account was increased by $210.2 million above the request, including $23.5 million related to new cyber incident reporting requirements for critical infrastructure entities.
Appropriators also added $15 million to the agency’s request to develop a pilot program to make available commercial cybersecurity share services for critical infrastructure entities to use to bolster their cyber defenses and mitigate vulnerabilities.