Biden administration nears completion of second cybersecurity executive order with plethora of agenda items

Cyber experts have differing views on what any follow-up to the first cyber executive order should include.

“It’s important for a subsequent executive order to really take inventory of what was in the first one to see which items should carry forward, because very few of those action steps are ever 100% obtained,” said Brandon Pugh, director of the R Street Institute’s cybersecurity and emerging threats team. “Regardless of how this election turns out, we’re going to have a new administration, and that’s one risk of putting something out.”

That doesn’t necessarily mean that the politics of cyber will change, so much as the likelihood that “a new president will have some degree of vision when it comes to cybersecurity regardless of who is elected,” Pugh said, meaning anything that’s prescriptive or has a lot of mandates might conflict with the incoming president’s vision.