WASHINGTON, D.C. – During today’s House Appropriations Committee Subcommittee on Homeland Security hearing, Congressman Tony Gonzales (TX-23) highlighted the University of Texas-El Paso during his questioning of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Acting Director, Bridget Bean.

 

Transcript lightly edited for clarity

 

Congressman Gonzales: Thank you, Director, for your service to our country, and thank you for all the men and women at CISA, for everything that you all do. We always talk about ecosystem and all these threats and how we grow this out. I want to talk about universities. I'm blessed to be in Texas, we have some amazing universities. I was just speaking with Heather Wilson, who is doing a great job as President of UTEP. What can we do more to work with some of the universities? Is CISA doing anything in particular with UTEP…and then are you doing anything with any other universities?

 

CISA Acting Director Bean: “CISA is all about partnerships, understanding that cybersecurity is a team sport. We can't do it by ourselves, and universities and institutions of higher learning play a critical role. And we do, we work with them at multiple levels. At the national level, we have engagement with universities, but also at the local level, our whole regional force is on the ground in those communities, working with universities to do three things. One is to make sure that we are highlighting the importance of cybersecurity in the curriculum and getting folks to go to school…to build the next generation of cyber defenders. Secondly, to make sure that we're learning from them. Some of the best and brightest ideas about how to defend our critical infrastructure is coming out of those institutions. Our regional staff is working with them to make sure that we're getting that information, feeding it back up…really trying to be efficient and cost-effective… lastly, the third one is just to make sure that we have academia, international partners, the federal government, state and local governments, communicating so that that we are leveraging resources and not duplicating them.

 

Congressman Gonzales: As we go through this budget process, that could be a sweet spot. There are all these opportunities and if CISA is…partnering with all these places, it's going to be very hard for us to say we want less of that, and it's going to be very easy for us [to want] more of that.

 

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