This Week in Government Tech Media – October 3, 2025 

By Brad Bass /

If you’ve been following the news reported by the government tech media over the past couple of weeks, you’ve noticed that the chaos and confusion reflected in those reports have increased. Fortunately, this week, things calmed down.

I’m kidding, of course.

As feared, the federal government was shut down this week as Congress continued to struggle to agree on a spending bill. Government tech reporters are watching developments closely and ensuring that readers are up to speed with ongoing coverage about everything they need to know about how the shutdown will affect technology and cybersecurity initiatives. Here’s my weekly roundup of those articles:

The Shutdown

With the caveat that this remains a fluid situation, here’s a roundup of the latest news on the government shutdown as of our publication date:

  • FedScoop provided an agency-by-agency briefing on how the shutdown was expected to affect IT operations across the government, with Miranda Nazzaro, Madison Alder and Matt Bracken contributing to the roundup.
  • Frank Konkel, editor in chief of GovExec, has been posting a daily update on LinkedIn detailing “what we know” about the shutdown to date.
  • In MeriTalk, Grace Dille reported that the White House warned that layoffs of federal employees were “imminent” due to the shutdown, and the number of affected employees could be in the thousands. In a separate piece, Dille wrote that the Small Business Innovation Research Program and the Small Business Technology Transfer Program expired, a casualty of the broader shutdown fight.
  • Experts said the shutdown may cause delays in contracts and deferred maintenance that lead to a more costly and outdated government IT infrastructure, according to reporting by Ross Gianfortune for GovCIO Media.
  • At least for now, some agencies are tapping into carryover funds and other sources of revenue to keep more of their programs and services running in the absence of congressional appropriations, according to an article by Jory Heckman for Federal News Network.
  • The General Services Administration’s OneGov technology procurement program will remain in operation during the shutdown but may experience a slowdown, Alexandra Kelley reported in Nextgov/FCW.
  • FedScoop’s Nazzaro noted that furloughed Department of Education workers discovered that their automatic email replies had been altered, without their knowledge, to include a message blaming Democratic senators for the ongoing government shutdown. Heckman also covered the story, quoting an anonymous Education employee: “Those were not my words.”
  • Covering the Pentagon’s shutdown plans, Ashley Roque wrote in Breaking Defense that military personnel on active duty — including reserve component personnel on federal active duty — will continue reporting for duty and may be asked to carry out jobs normally performed by civilian personnel.
  • MeriTalk’s Dille quoted public comments by Sen. Marsha Blackburn, warning that the funding lapse could endanger national security, stating, “Bad actors and adversaries do not take a day off.”
  • Looking at the effects of the shutdown from the contractors’ perspective, Nick Wakeman of Washington Technology wrote that at least 1 million contractor employees face lost paychecks as the funding lapse disrupts their companies’ services to agencies and freezes federal operations. Wakeman also reported that the shutdown will delay protest rulings by the Government Accountability Office related to a Coast Guard procurement.
  • Even if the shutdown is resolved soon, the effects will continue. “Even after a shutdown ends, restarting stalled IT work doesn’t happen immediately,” Natalie Alms noted in Nextgov/FCW.

Cybersecurity Implications

Last week, we noted a number of articles about various government-targeted cyberattacks. Judging from those articles and the related ones from this week compiled below, this shutdown is particularly anxiety inducing:

  • Covering the shutdown’s impact on cybersecurity, Justin Doubleday of Federal News Network found the cyber community “on edge,” with many government staff furloughed under the ongoing shutdown and key authorities now lapsed amid the funding impasse.
  • Chris Riotta wrote in GovInfoSecurity that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) lost about 65% of its staff due to lack of appropriations to pay their salaries.
  • Experts told David DiMolfetta of Nextgov/FCW that this diminished workforce means less capability to analyze and track cyber threats, complicated further by the expiration of “a bedrock cybersecurity data-sharing law” in tandem with a lapse in appropriations. In another piece, DiMolfetta wrote that legal professionals are working to help clients with new contract arrangements to facilitate data-sharing channels previously enabled by the now-expired Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015.
  • Along those same lines, Joseph Menn of The Washington Post noted that the shutdown and expiring law has left CISA employees “unsettled as they try to fend off a surge in sophisticated hacks from China as well as continued ransomware threats.”
  • Weslan Hansen reported in MeriTalk that experts are warning that the shutdown combined with Congress’s failure to reauthorize the information sharing law have put cyber defenses at risk, and putting pressure on state and local governments and industry members to pick up the slack.
  • The anxiety was heightened by the elimination of federal funding this week for the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC), state and local governments’ main cybersecurity resource, “signaling major security risks ahead for tens of thousands of jurisdictions across the United States that will lose the group’s suite of vital cybersecurity services,” according to an article by Eric Geller in tech publication Cybersecurity Dive.
  • CISA confirmed the end of its support for the MS-ISAC program, noting that the agency plans to transition to “a new model” of supporting state and local government agencies’ cybersecurity through grant funding, no-cost tools and cybersecurity expertise, Colin Wood wrote in StateScoop.

Upcoming Industry Events

Industry events will continue to be held during the shutdown. We’ve listed some that will present opportunities for you to meet in person and share information with colleagues during the coming week:

That’s my roundup for this week. I’ll be back next week to update you on the latest coverage from the government tech media. I hope you’re finding this information useful. If so, tell a friend to subscribe on LinkedIn or via the form below.