The Fire Alarm Is Ringing—And We’re Cutting the Wires
There’s no need to imagine what a cyberattack on the United States looks like. You’ve already seen the previews.
Hospitals in Connecticut paralyzed. A gas pipeline on the Eastern seaboard shut down. Meat processing plants held hostage. Voter rolls mysteriously glitching. You remember the headlines. What you might not know is that these weren’t one-offs. They were dress rehearsals. And right now, while adversaries refine their attacks in real time, the U.S. government is making a stunning choice:
We’re taking down our own defenses.
Not because we’ve outgrown them. Not because we’ve solved the problem. But because political inertia, budget theater, and factional turf wars have led to a hollowing out of the very agencies tasked with protecting our digital lives. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)? Bleeding staff. Critical funding? Slashed or stalled. Key leadership roles? Vacant, or worse—filled with partisans who think cyber risk is just another hot take on cable news.
Let’s be clear: this is not belt-tightening. This is self-inflicted sabotage.
Cybersecurity isn’t some futuristic luxury. It’s the digital plumbing of the modern world. Your power grid, your bank account, your hospital, your election—none of it functions without protection from the relentless, invisible siege being waged online by nations who don't need to fly jets or plant flags to cause chaos. They just need our apathy—and our dysfunction.
Right now, adversaries like Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea are pouring money into offensive cyber units. Teenagers in state-sponsored bunkers are reverse-engineering American code like it’s their national sport. They’ve breached our energy grid. They’ve entered federal networks. They’ve already practiced shutting down parts of America.
And we? We’re defunding the firewall.
If this sounds like madness, that’s because it is. What we’re witnessing is the slow-motion unraveling of our digital immune system. And it’s happening in boardrooms and subcommittees, not on battlefields. There is no missile launch, no Pearl Harbor moment. There’s just the screen that doesn’t turn on. The ATM that won’t dispense. The water treatment facility that malfunctions and no one can explain why.
This isn’t just a federal issue. When cyber defense falters:
Small-town hospitals divert trauma patients because hackers locked the records.
Local governments pay millions in ransom because someone clicked the wrong PDF.
Public utility grids go down while temperatures hit 100 degrees.
It’s easy to imagine cyberwar as science fiction. But to the tens of thousands of Americans already affected by ransomware, spoofing, and infrastructure hacks, it’s a daily reality. The only thing preventing the next cyberattack from being a mass-scale humanitarian crisis is the resilience of a cyber infrastructure that is currently being defunded by the people it protects.
If that sounds insane, it’s because we’ve let cybersecurity become a partisan piñata rather than the bipartisan imperative it truly is.
The irony? We’re excellent at cyber offense. The NSA has capabilities that rival any digital force on Earth. But imagine an elite boxer with no guard. That’s America’s cybersecurity posture today—world-class punch, zero chin.
Here’s the bottom line: You cannot build a modern democracy on digital sand. Without strong cyber defenses, we are as vulnerable as the least-patched laptop in a federal office.
We’ve seen the adversaries. We’ve seen their methods. And we’ve seen what happens when our guard is down.
What we haven’t seen—what we desperately need to see—is the political will to stop pretending that cutting cyber defense is a rounding error on a spreadsheet.
It’s not. It’s a national security breach in slow motion.
And the enemy isn’t at the gates. He’s already inside the router.