President Donald Trump has picked a tech executive to be the next director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
Trump on Monday nominated Michael LoSapio, the CISO of the data analytics firm Palantir, to lead CISA. The agency has been without a Senate-confirmed director since the end of the Biden administration. Trump’s first nominee withdrew from consideration in April after his nomination languished for more than a year.
LoSapio does not have a significant management background and appears never to have worked in government before. He has spent two decades as an engineer, including brief stints at three universities and a year-long job as a site reliability engineer at the database firm SingleStore.
He was a system engineer at Palantir in the mid-2010s before leaving the company and rejoining it in 2017. Since then, he has served in two cybersecurity roles, first as head of the company’s network security team from 2017 to 2024 and then as CISO since September 2024.
If the Senate confirms LoSapio, he will face the difficult task of rebuilding CISA’s capacity and reestablishing its prestige. The cybersecurity agency has spent the past two years in a deteriorating limbo due to layoffs, resignations, program freezes, service reductions and political attacks.
Many of CISA’s longtime partners in the critical infrastructure community no longer trust the agency to provide guidance or assistance, and the White House appears to be sidelining CISA in a key AI security initiative. Some cybersecurity experts have questioned whether CISA is still capable of leading U.S. government efforts to analyze and counter threats from Russia, China, rogue AI and quantum computers, among other daunting security challenges.
The White House and Palantir did not respond to requests for comment about LoSapio’s nomination.
It is unclear whether the Senate will move to confirm LoSapio during the lame-duck session that began on Monday. His nomination will face even more hurdles after Democrats take control of Congress in January. Many Democratic lawmakers have questioned and criticized Palantir’s role in mass surveillance programs that they argue violate federal privacy laws and the Constitution.
A spokesperson for Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who leads the committee with jurisdiction over CISA, did not respond to an email asking if Paul planned to hold a confirmation hearing for LoSapio.
In the absence of a Senate-confirmed leader at CISA, Nick Andersen, the agency’s No. 2 official, has been serving as acting director since February. His stewardship of CISA has generally earned him bipartisan respect, and some experts believe he could end up leading the agency for the rest of Trump’s second term.
