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The president’s latest executive order accelerates the move to mandatory compliance by software providers. It may run afoul of the Trump mandate to deregulate.
David E. Sanger covers national security and foreign policy issues, and wrote a book about the emergence of cyberconflict as the new battle space among nations.
- Jan. 16, 2025Updated 6:01 p.m. ET
President Biden issued an executive order on Thursday requiring software companies selling their product to the federal government to prove they included ironclad security features that can thwart Chinese intelligence agencies, Russian ransomware gangs, North Korean cryptocurrency thieves and Iranian spies.
But it is unclear whether the Trump administration, intent on deregulation even while it vows to take on China in particular, will keep the overhauled cybersecurity rules.
The order, which came with four days left in Mr. Biden’s term, is the last in his administration’s four-year fight to secure American infrastructure and defeat increasingly ingenious surveillance operations.
But after four years of that daily, grinding confrontation — where much of the new cold war with China has played out — the hackers have usually come out ahead. In the past two years, there have been repeated, successful Chinese breaches of the utility grid, the nation’s pipelines, the telecommunications system and, in recent weeks, the Treasury Department. Those attacks have led the incoming Trump administration to complain that America’s defenses remain easily pierced and its deterrent capabilities insufficient.
As Mr. Biden’s list of new regulations and orders lengthens, covering issues like drilling off the East Coast and removing Cuba from the terrorism list, Mr. Trump’s advisers are complaining that the current administration is on a furious campaign to lock them in to its policies and mandates.
Some will be reversed next week, making many of Mr. Biden’s steps nothing more than an exiting political gesture. But the new cybersecurity requirements add a wrinkle to that debate, potentially setting up a conflict between the Trump administration’s vow to deregulate and its pledge to defend against Chinese intrusions into American networks.
