White House Unveils President Trump’s Cyber Strategy for America 

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On March 6, 2026, the White House published “President Trump’s Cyber Strategy for America”, describing the administration's plans for ensuring the U.S. remains “unrivaled in cyberspace”.  The strategy outlines a proactive, “America First” approach that leverages U.S. military, industrial, and technological power to defend and promote national interests.

Overarching goals include disrupting adversarial cyber campaigns, enhancing the defensibility of national systems, and accelerating domestic innovation and growth to ensure “American technology dominance”. To achieve these, the administration commits to coordinating operations across the federal government, international community, and private sector, including by:

• Strategically cooperating with international allies to promote national security and U.S. economic interests.
• Reducing and removing regulatory barriers to expedite the adoption and implementation of new technologies.   
• Partnering with industry and academia to promote further innovation in cyberspace.  
• Incentivizing the private sector to better defend against cyberattacks, compete with foreign technology sales, and scale national capabilities. 

PILLARS OF ACTION

Policy priorities are organized into the following six “Pillars of Actions,” meant to guide the administration in implementing, funding, and measuring the success of its actions:   

I. Shape Adversary Behavior

The administration first aims to "detect, confront, and defeat cyber adversaries" by utilizing comprehensive government operations and empowering the private sector to both “identify and disrupt adversary networks” and enhance and scale national capabilities. This includes deploying “the full suite of U.S. government defensive and offensive cyber operations” and “unleash[ing] the privacy sector” through incentives to “create real risk for adversaries who seek to harm us, and impos[ing] consequences on those who do act against us.”

II. Promote Common Sense Regulation

The administration promises to focus on streamlining cyber regulations to “reduce compliance burdens, address liability, and better align regulators and industry globally” in order to enable the private sector to “keep pace with rapidly evolving threats.” The administration also notes it will “emphasize the right to privacy for Americans and American data.”

III. Modernize and Secure Federal Networks

The administration plans to “accelerate the modernization, defensibility, and resilience” of federal networks and information systems through “cybersecurity best practices,” including “post-quantum cryptography, zero-trust architecture, and cloud transition.” Emphasis is placed on adopting AI-powered cybersecurity solutions to “defend federal networks and deter intrusions,” and removing barriers from the procurement process so the government can access and utilize the best technology. 

IV. Secure Critical Infrastructure

The administration further focuses on strengthening the nation’s “critical infrastructure and supply chains”, including defense critical infrastructure and adjacent vendors, private companies, networks and services – such as “energy grid, financial and telecommunication systems, data centers, water utilities, and hospitals,” by promoting and employing U.S. technologies and energizing state, local, Tribal, and territorial authorities to complement national cybersecurity efforts.  

V. Sustain Superior Technologies

This pillar focuses on “[s]ecuring American innovation and protecting our national intellectual advantage”. The administration promises to “build secure technologies and supply chains that protect user privacy from design to deployment,” which includes support for cryptocurrencies, blockchain technologies, post-quantum cryptography, and quantum computing. They additionally emphasize the use of AI technology, including data centers and agentic AI, to “promote innovation in AI security” and advance “global stability”, as well as “frustrate the spread of foreign AI platforms that censor, surveil, and mislead their users.” 

VI. Build Talent and Capacity

Finally, the administration details initiatives to invest in the nation’s cyber workforce, including by better utilizing “existing avenues within academia, vocational and technical schools, corporations, and venture capital opportunities” to both train the current workforce and recruit and develop talent.  This includes removing the barriers that prevent collaboration among the government, military, industry, and academia.

EXECUTIVE ORDER

The White House’s release of its cyber strategy includes the promise of “follow-on policy vehicles”, the first of which was an Executive Order (EO) released the same day, along with a corresponding Fact Sheet. The EO, titled “Combating Cybercrime, Fraud, and Predatory Schemes Against American Citizens”, addresses the administration’s efforts to combat cybercrimes against individuals, businesses, and critical infrastructure in the U.S., including “ransomware and malware, phishing, financial fraud, 'sextortion,' and other extortion schemes, impersonation, and more”. The EO specifically focuses on dismantling Transnational Criminal Organizations (TCOs) that target Americans.

President Trump first mandates that the federal actors, including the Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury, Secretary of War, Attorney General, Secretary of Homeland Security, Office of the National Cyber Director, and Assistant to the President and Homeland Security Advisor, review the current national frameworks for combating cybercrime to determine how each can be improved to better address TCOs engaged in cyber-enabled crime and similar predatory schemes. 

Then, within 120 days of the EO, these agencies must submit an action plan that identifies TCOs and proposes solutions to “prevent, disrupt, investigate, and dismantle” them. As part of the action plan, the President directs the creation of an “operational cell” to coordinate federal efforts within the National Coordination Center (NCC), which was established to support homeland security activities across federal agencies pursuant to EO 14159, “Protecting the American People Against Invasion” (signed on January 20, 2025). More specifically, the action plan and operational cell must include mechanisms to improve information sharing, operational coordination, and rapid response across the federal government, and shall align with existing frameworks and efforts to counter cyber-enabled threats from foreign jurisdictions.

Finally, the President further directed federal actors to take the following additional actions.

• The Secretary of Homeland Security, acting through the Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), is directed to partner with the NCC to provide “training, technical assistance, and resilience building” to support state, local, Tribal and territorial partners, including “to expand defensive capacity, share threat intelligence, and harden [their] critical infrastructure systems against cybercrime exploitation by TCOs.”
• The Attorney General is directed to prioritize the prosecution of cybercrimes and to recommend, within 90 days of the EO, the establishment of a Victims Restoration Program.
• The Secretary of State is directed to engage with foreign governments to demand enforcement actions against TCOs operating within their borders, and to impose economic and diplomatic consequences on nations that “tolerate such predatory activity.”