President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Friday that aimed at amending parts of cybersecurity-related directives from the Biden and Obama administrations, which he deemed problematic.
According to the fact sheet, Biden’s order led to “unproven and burdensome” software accounting processes that prioritized “compliance checklists over genuine security investments.”
His order also removed a mandate requiring government agencies to issue digital IDs for illegal immigrants, which the administration said would have “facilitated entitlement fraud and other abuse.”
His order states that cyber sanctions “do not apply to election-related activities,” as the administration seeks to prevent their misuse against domestic political opponents.
In addition, Trump’s order called for federal action on border gateway security to prevent “hijacking of network interconnections” and on post-quantum cryptography to secure against threats “that may leverage next generation compute architectures.”
The order also states that it will refocus artificial intelligence (AI) cybersecurity efforts towards “identifying and managing vulnerabilities, rather than censorship,” and implement technical measures to ensure that “Americans can know that their personal and home devices meet basic security engineering principles.”
The White House stated that it aims to eliminate barriers to AI innovation in order to keep the technology sector competitive at the cutting edge of new developments and “free from ideological bias.”
“President Trump has made it clear that this Administration will do what it takes to make America cyber secure—including focusing relentlessly on technical and organizational professionalism to improve the security and resilience of the nation’s information systems and networks,” it stated.