Good news, bad news for state and local cyber grant funding, says NASCIO director

There’s good news and bad news for proponents of the State and Local Cybersecurity Grant Program, the $1 billion tranche of funding designed to shore up digital defenses in local governments across the country, a state technology association director said Tuesday.

The good news, said Doug Robinson, executive director of the National Association of State Chief Information Officers, is that it appears the SLCGP will not see its final year of funding clawed back — “the states may get their final portion,” Robinson said. The bad news, he said, is that the program appears unlikely to see reauthorization under the current presidential administration, which continues to eliminate funding across a broad array of programs, including the Department of Homeland Security and its cybersecurity division.

“That’s important to our local government folks, because 80% of those dollars are passed down to local governments for cybersecurity,” Robinson said during a webinar hosted Tuesday by the nonprofit Public Technology Institute.

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