South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem had harsh criticism for the nation’s leading cybersecurity agency on Friday during her confirmation hearing for Secretary of Homeland Security.

Appearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Noem repeatedly said efforts to address foreign disinformation campaigns were outside of the remit of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). 

CISA’s work alongside other federal law enforcement agencies in tackling disinformation and misinformation — pushed heavily on social media by Russia, China, Iran and others — has become a lightning rod of controversy in conservative and right-wing circles. 

Multiple Republican senators used the hearing as a platform to bash CISA’s work, with several arguing that efforts to stop the spread of false information about COVID-19 and the 2020 Presidential Election violated the First Amendment.

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), who previously floated the idea of either limiting or outright getting rid of CISA entirely, demanded Noem conduct an investigation into the agency’s disinformation work.

“CISA needs to be much more effective, smaller, more nimble, to really fulfill their mission,” Noem said. “The mission of it is to hunt and harden. It's to find those bad actors and help work with local and state critical infrastructure entities so that they can help them be prepared for such cyberattacks.”

She said the agency’s work on misinformation shows it has “gotten far off mission” and involved “using their resources in ways that was never intended.” 

If confirmed, she pledged to move the agency away from such efforts. 

“The misinformation and disinformation that they have stuck their toe into and meddled with, should be refocused back onto what their job is,” she said.

Yet when she was asked about growing concerns over homegrown terrorists and the spread of violent ideologies online, Noem criticized CISA for being “incredibly siloed” and for not communicating “with other intelligence agencies like they should.”

“We also need to have CISA have interaction with the FBI, CIA to make sure they're working together to stop these types of threats and identify when they're growing among our citizens,” she said, declining to elaborate on how CISA should tackle the spread of online extremist content.

One of the key cybersecurity concerns raised was Noem’s record on that subject as governor of South Dakota. She was one of only two governors to turn down federal grants meant to help protect state governments from cyberattacks. Shortly after turning down the critical funds, Noem confirmed that her own phone had been hacked. 

When asked directly about her decision, she said she turned down the federal cybersecurity funding because she believed the program’s requirements would have forced her to “grow her state government” — something she is against. 

“The administration costs of it would have been much more than would have been able to facilitate at the local level, and our state was already proactively helping these individuals that needed the resources to secure their systems,” she said.

Senator Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), one of the key figures behind the cyber grant effort, said the law purposefully put few requirements on the grant program other than to make sure the funds are spent in a way that is authorized. 

Noem argued that she took several other steps to expand South Dakota’s cybersecurity industry and prioritized the topic as a field of study at Dakota State University. 

Throughout the rest of the nearly three-hour hearing, Noem mentioned CISA and cybersecurity sparingly, only briefly discussing the recent Chinese cyberattacks on telecommunications companies and critical infrastructure.  

She mentioned vague efforts to “leverage private, public partnerships” and advance the use of unnamed novel technologies to “protect our nation's digital landscape.”

“We have to plan bigger and think faster and smarter,” she said. “One of the things that disturbs me the most is that we don't necessarily even know how some of these espionage attacks that have infiltrated our systems have happened. We don't know how to stop them yet.”

As one of the least controversial cabinet picks promoted by President-elect Donald Trump, Noem is likely to be confirmed. 

Multiple news outlets have reported that Trump is likely to select Sean Plankey as the next director of CISA. Plankey previously served as director for maritime and Pacific cybersecurity policy on Trump’s National Security Council before shifting to being part of the Energy Department’s Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security and Emergency Response.