This Week in Government Tech Media – April 10, 2026

By Brad Bass /

Before we jump into our weekly news roundup, congratulations to the journalists who were nominated for the inaugural Echo Awards recognizing excellence in public sector reporting. Voting is now open! Cast your vote here.

The big news this week was the release of the White House’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2027, which included record funding for the administration’s tech priorities – but also reductions targeted at various cybersecurity initiatives. We also continued to see coverage of tech-related developments surrounding the conflict in Iran, including urgent warnings of cyber threats.

  • 2027 Tech Budget: A Mixed Bag
  • Iranian Cyber Threats

2027 Tech Budget: A Mixed Bag

We saw a broad range of coverage in government tech media around the White House fiscal 2027 budget proposal, with many of the headlines focused on the record-setting amount of funding requested. But there were also several articles on cuts related to cybersecurity. Here’s a roundup of some of that coverage:

  • Starting with the Defense funding request, analysts told Valerie Insinna of Breaking Defense that the Pentagon’s proposed $1.5 trillion budget for fiscal 2027— comprising a $1.15 trillion base request and $350 billion in reconciliation — will face an uphill battle on Capitol Hill.
  • Insinna’s colleague Carley Welch noted that more than a third of the Pentagon budget would go toward research, development, testing and evaluation – with the Army receiving $18.75 billion to push forward some of its most high profile programs.
  • The administration wants $17.5 billion for the Pentagon’s Golden Dome missile defense system in fiscal 2027 – after receiving a $23 billion down payment through a reconciliation bill passed last summer, according to an article by Anastasia Obis in Federal News Network.
  • The proposed budget includes billions of dollars for the Air Force in additional spending on advanced next-generation fighters, trainer aircraft and hypersonic missiles – which one observer called “paltry” compared to the overall Pentagon budget request, Stephen Losey reported in Air & Space Forces Magazine.
  • Looking at the civilian side of the budget, Jason Miller of Federal News Network wrote that the White House wants a record $75.7 billion for civilian agency IT, with the departments of Justice, Veterans Affairs (VA) and Treasury among the biggest winners when it comes to increasing their technology budgets.
  • Despite the upward trend for overall spending on tech, the budget request calls for a small decrease in funding for cybersecurity across all civilian agencies, as noted in a report in FedScoop by Matt Bracken and Billy Mitchell.
  • The Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) stands to take a hit as a result of the relatively lower emphasis on cybersecurity, with the administration proposing to eliminate roughly $700 million in agency programs in fiscal year 2027, according to a report from David DiMolfetta in Nextgov/FCW.
  • Weslan Hansen of MeriTalk reported that the proposal would cut CISA’s stakeholder engagement program and eliminate almost 900 agency positions.
  • The proposal also would make the Office of Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction a distinct office within CISA, according to coverage by Courtney Benedetto in SIGNAL Media.
  • In his take on the proposed CISA cuts, Eduard Kovacs of trade publication Security Week quoted the administration positioning the cuts as a way to eliminate “weaponization and waste.” “CISA was more focused on censorship than on protecting the nation’s critical systems, and put them at risk due to poor management and inefficiency, as well as a focus on self-promotion,” the proposal said.
  • Cybersecurity at the Department of Energy was also on the chopping block, with the budget proposing a 16% funding cut for the department’s Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response, which oversees U.S. energy infrastructure security and resilience, Hansen noted in MeriTalk.
  • In a rare bit of positive cyber budget news, FedScoop’s Mitchell wrote that the Department of Justice requested a major boost in fiscal 2027 funding to support IT modernization and enterprise cybersecurity, with the entire increase going directly to the agency’s zero-trust cybersecurity architecture.
  • In other news related to civilian agency budget requests, Jeff Foust of Space News reported that the proposal did not include any funding for the Commerce Department’s work on the Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS), a civil space traffic coordination system the department has been developing.
  • The proposal also includes no new funding for the General Service Administration’s Technology Modernization Fund in fiscal 2027, instead relying on transfer authority to sustain the government’s central IT modernization fund, according to coverage by Grace Dille in MeriTalk.
  • The VA Affairs will receive an 11% increase in funding for decision intelligence and automation activities, with the growth “driven primarily by the AI Infrastructure solution,” Edward Graham wrote in Nextgov/FCW.

Iranian Cyber Threats

Government tech media reporters joined their counterparts in the mainstream media and tech trade publications in reporting on recent Iran-affiliated cyberattacks against U.S. critical infrastructure:

  • Chris Riotta of GovInfoSecurity reported that CISA and other agencies warned that Iran-aligned threat actors are targeting programmable logic controllers manufactured by Rockwell Automation/Allen-Bradley, among other vulnerable operational technology (OT) devices in critical infrastructure sectors nationwide.
  • The FBI, National Security Agency, Environmental Protection Agency, Energy Department and Cyber Command all joined CISA in urging urgent protective measures on the part of critical infrastructure organizations, Tim Starks noted in CyberScoop.
  • Starks’ colleague Matt Kapko covered a research report that said fallout and potential exposure from Iran’s state-backed targeting of U.S. critical infrastructure extends to more than 5,200 internet-connected devices.
  • Reporting for CNN, Sean Lyngaas wrote that sources said the hacks caused some industrial processes at the sites to shut down, forcing them to operate manually.
  • Priority targets include sectors such as energy, wastewater treatment, transportation and telecommunications, along with the defense industrial base, federal contractors and government mission-support systems, Steve Zurier reported in cyber publication SC Media.
  • In her coverage of the joint advisory for MeriTalk, Hansen quoted it as stating that “organizations from multiple U.S. critical infrastructure sectors experienced disruptions through malicious interactions with the project files and the manipulation of data displayed on human machine interface…displays.”
  • In other news related to the Iran conflict, the Defense Innovation Unit is working on a software fix to address the lack of relevant intelligence and data that resulted in the loss of U.S. planes since the launch of Operation Epic Fury, according to an article by Patrick Tucker in Defense One.

Upcoming Industry Events

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