SAN FRANCISCO — Threat intelligence sharing is flowing between the private sector and federal government and remains unimpeded thus far by job losses and budget cuts across federal agencies that support the cyber mission, according to executives at major security firms.
Top brass at Amazon, CrowdStrike, Google and Palo Alto Networks said there’s been no change to interactions with the federal government since President Donald Trump was inaugurated earlier this year.
Across multiple interviews and media briefings during the RSAC 2025 Conference this week, none of the leaders at these top cybersecurity companies conveyed any concern about or experience with communication breakdowns. Each of them dismissed the idea that collaboration has slowed down amid significant workforce reductions and strategic changes across the federal government.
“We haven’t seen any change in that regard,” said CJ Moses, Amazon’s chief information security officer. “We’re monitoring the situation just like everybody else, to see if there’s any changes. But as it stands today, there hasn’t been any impact to our ability to share the information that’s needed.”
This broad messaging asserting that threat intelligence sharing remains as robust as ever comes amid steady cuts that would seemingly bear some impact on federal agencies’ ability to keep up in an ever-growing threat landscape. Trump’s proposed fiscal 2026 budget calls for a nearly 17% cut to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agenc, a $491 million decrease from the agency’s roughly $3 billion annual budget.
Cost-cutting measures, staffing cuts and strategic changes at the national and international level have created a dynamic environment that’s pushed cybersecurity companies to adapt how they communicate with their peers in government, said Wendi Whitmore, chief security intelligence officer at Palo Alto Networks
The good news, she said, is that intelligence sharing often occurs at the practitioner level with hands-on researchers and analysts in the private and public sectors. “That information sharing I don’t think has changed and been thwarted,” Whitmore said.
While some people have left or been unceremoniously dismissed from their government jobs, others have advanced to new roles, and personal relationships formed during previous work can keep important lines of communication intact, executives told CyberScoop.
“Hopefully people that are moving into roles are people that you’ve got relationships from working with previously and vice versa,” Whitmore said. “In that sense, I think it’s not as negative as we might be hearing about.”
The staffers that work at federal agencies day in and day out are mostly still there and haven’t changed, said Adam Meyers, senior vice president of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike.
“It’s the same people. Some of them have advanced because, as some of the political appointees that are at these agencies have transferred out, which is typical of any administrative change, they’ve taken up acting roles,” he said.
“Largely, the focus and the mission has remained the same at these agencies,” Meyers said. “I have either the same or new contacts, depending on if they’re political appointees or if they’re career government employees.”
Ultimately, the mission of cyber defense continues to operate as needed at the federal level and government agencies are still responding quickly and taking action, Meyers added.
Sandra Joyce, vice president at Google Threat Intelligence, shared a similar perspective in a separate discussion during the RSAC 2025 Conference.
“So far, we have been able to continue our mission of supporting all of our customers and sharing intelligence with our partners,” she said. “The way that we have planned that is through partnerships — contract work, that type of thing — and so far, we are continuing to do that mission right now.”
Presidential administration changes, and everything that comes along with them — budgetarily, strategically, staffing and otherwise — give cybersecurity companies and threat intelligence firms an opportunity to be more of a stabilizing factor, Whitmore said.
“We’ve got to step up a little bit more and make sure that everything we’re doing is helping protect as many organizations as possible,” she said.
“We still all have a job to do,” Whitmore said. “Cybersecurity is more important than ever — if it comes to kinetic warfare, if it comes to just the geopolitical landscape shifting and the role cybersecurity plays in the wake of events like foreign trade policy changing.”
While personnel changes and budgets for some agencies with cyber responsibilities remain in flux, security executives said they’ve also seen no change to formal government-run cooperative programs such as CISA’s Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative and the National Security Agency’s Cybersecurity Collaboration Center.
“There’s been no slowdown,” Meyers said. “The Cyber Collaboration Center is phenomenal and we’ve had continuous, seamless and no disruption between the last administration and this administration. So it’s been great.”
Amazon is monitoring the situation to see what, if any, changes come to these programs — but a change between administrations is the norm, Moses said. “We’ll wait and see how that kind of plays out with this administration, just like we have all the previous ones,” he added.
From Whitmore’s perspective, industry leaders are “really using this as an opportunity to work even more closely together.”
“We’ve got to make sure that, whether it’s the FBI or CISA, or NSA, that they’re getting this information,” she said, “and we have and we’ll continue to have strong partnerships.”
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