Justice wants $110.3M to boost zero-trust cybersecurity in fiscal 2027

The Department of Justice is asking Congress for a major boost in fiscal 2027 to the fund it uses to support IT modernization and enterprise cybersecurity, with the entire increase going directly to the agency’s zero-trust cybersecurity architecture.

DOJ has requested $149 million for its Justice Information Sharing Technology fund as part of the Trump administration’s fiscal 2027 budget request. Congress appropriated $38.5 million for the program in the past two fiscal years. 

The primary difference between this request and the funding enacted in the most recent years prior is the $110.3 million that DOJ says it needs to support its migration to a zero-trust architecture for its unclassified and national security systems.

To put that into perspective, Justice requested a more meager $11.8 million increase to the JIST fund’s topline in fiscal 2026 for “cybersecurity posture enhancement,” which it did not get.

In its congressional budget justification for 2027, Justice explains that despite an industrywide shift to zero trust as the cybersecurity model of choice in response to the SolarWinds attack on federal agencies in 2020, its funding for cyber was cut by $108 million in fiscal 2024 and remained essentially flat since then. Justice was among the federal agencies impacted by the SolarWinds incident.

“Enacted funding levels over the past three years are below the level required to cover DOJ’s over 275,000 endpoints and approximately 160,000 users,” the budget document states, adding that “the current funding levels impact the Department’s current defenses and constrain its ability to adapt to evolving threats.”

Without a full move to zero trust, which the Biden administration mandated in its cyber-focused Executive Order 14028 in May 2021 in the wake of the SolarWinds breaches, “the Department’s cyber risk exposure and its susceptibility to major breaches and catastrophic cyber incidents compromising DOJ’s capacity to safeguard sensitive law enforcement, national security, and mission-critical systems or infrastructure increases.”

Justice paints a bleak picture in its justification of what will happen to the zero-trust architecture progress it has made to date if it is once again shortchanged by Congress on this request. Namely, it will have to discontinue its work deploying a trio of key zero-trust systems: a central identity provider platform, a cloud-based network broker system, and a solution that manages endpoint detection and response and mobile threat detection. 

Without the identity platform, it explains, the department would be forced to “move applications back to the previous state, one which allows attackers that successfully gain unauthorized, undetected access to DOJ systems to move laterally within the environment to escalate privileges or exfiltrate sensitive data.”

Similarly, stepping away from the network broker model will hamper DOJ’s “cross-component information sharing and collaboration” and require a move back to “traditional Virtual Private Networks (VPN) that lack the advanced continuous monitoring and granular access controls needed to protect the Department from sophisticated cyber threats and breaches.”

And with no EDR or MDR capabilities in place, Justice would struggle to “identify and mitigate cyber threats like ransomware and malware in real time and diminish the availability of the telemetry data required to proactively hunt for suspicious activity.”

The bulk of the requested funding — $66.1 million — would go specifically to zero trust for DOJ’s national security and classified systems, which it explains “hold the nation’s most sensitive information.”