CISA, FBI, and NSA are all absent from RSAC 2026 — the cybersecurity industry's biggest conference. The trigger was personal: the former CISA director was hired as CEO. The consequences are structural: cancelled sessions included operations disrupting Beijing's espionage campaigns. The vacuum is being filled by companies whose security priorities are aligned with their revenue, not with national defense.
On January 15, 2026, RSAC announced that Jen Easterly — the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency under Biden — would serve as its new CEO. Eight days later, every CISA, FBI, and NSA speaker disappeared from the conference agenda. The agencies offered no joint statement. FBI and NSA declined to comment. CISA spokesperson Marci McCarthy called it "stewardship of taxpayer dollars."
RSAC 2026 opened this week in San Francisco with roughly forty-three thousand attendees, seven hundred speakers, and four hundred fifty sessions. It is the cybersecurity industry's largest annual gathering — the place where government agencies, private companies, and independent researchers have coordinated on threat intelligence, operational partnerships, and policy for over three decades. This year, one side of that coordination did not show up.
What Was Cancelled
The sessions that disappeared from the agenda are not generic panels. One was titled "Hunt for China's Typhoons" — a behind-the-scenes look at how the FBI, NSA, and private industry disrupted Beijing's espionage campaigns targeting American critical infrastructure. Another was an FBI cyber warfare briefing. A third was a multi-agency panel on how organizations can develop incident response plans with federal partners.
These are not thought leadership sessions. They are operational briefings — the kind where analysts share indicators of compromise, discuss active threat campaigns, and build the relationships that allow a private company to call a government contact at two in the morning when they find something in their network. The government did not just withdraw its speakers. It withdrew from the room where operational coordination happens.
The conference theme this year is "Many Voices. One Community."
The Numbers Behind the Absence
CISA entered fiscal year 2025 with roughly thirty-four hundred employees. By the end of the year, approximately one thousand had left — through layoffs, voluntary buyouts, and early retirements. That is nearly a third of the agency's workforce. DOGE fired over one hundred employees, specifically targeting the red team — the group whose job was to simulate attacks on American infrastructure before adversaries could execute them.
Trump's fiscal year 2026 budget proposed four hundred ninety-five million dollars in cuts to CISA, reducing funding to under two billion dollars and eliminating over a thousand positions. The Cybersecurity Division — the core of the agency's mission — would lose two hundred sixteen million dollars, an eighteen percent reduction. The National Risk Management Center would lose seventy-three percent of its budget. Stakeholder Engagement — the division responsible for the kind of coordination that happens at RSAC — would lose sixty-two percent.
The House Appropriations subcommittee has since softened the proposed cut to 4.6 percent. But the workforce losses have already occurred. The red team is already gutted. The speakers are already absent.
Who Filled the Room
The conference did not shrink. It grew. Forty-three thousand people showed up to discuss cybersecurity without the agencies responsible for national cybersecurity.
Microsoft is keynoting today — "Ambient and Autonomous Security: Building Trust in the Agentic AI Era." Vasu Jakkal will announce the general availability of Agent 365, runtime threat protection for AI agents, and an expanded Zero Trust framework that now includes a dedicated AI pillar. Cisco's Jeetu Patel is keynoting on the same theme. Booz Allen launched an agentic cyber defense suite days before the conference. Three of the ten Innovation Sandbox finalists exist specifically to secure AI agents.
Four former NSA directors and Cyber Command commanders — Keith Alexander, Timothy Haugh, Paul Nakasone, and Mike Rogers — are on the agenda for a Tuesday panel titled "Inside Offensive Cyber." All four are retired. Haugh was fired by the Trump administration in April 2025. None are speaking in any official government capacity. They are private citizens sharing memories of what government cyber operations used to look like.
The active government — the agencies currently responsible for defending American networks against the threat campaigns those retired generals once oversaw — is not in the building.
The Structural Question
This journal has been tracking the cybersecurity vacuum from multiple angles. The Wrong War argued that RSAC's defenses were pointing in the wrong direction — toward model-layer threats while the real attack surface expanded at the agent layer. The Rebuild documented three hundred seventeen thousand federal employees leaving government in 2025. The Expulsion covered Anthropic being banned from federal agencies. The Proving Ground mapped the Sandbox finalists building agent security products.
Each entry captured a different face of the same fracture. The Vacancy is where the fracture becomes visible in a room.
The government retreated from cybersecurity coordination at the precise moment the attack surface underwent its most significant expansion in a generation. AI agents are creating new categories of vulnerability — prompt injection, memory poisoning, autonomous lateral movement, identity sprawl — that did not exist when these agencies last participated. The Intrusion documented an autonomous agent breaking into McKinsey's internal platform in two hours without credentials. The Window reported a critical Langflow vulnerability exploited within twenty hours of disclosure. The Assembly Line showed financially motivated attackers with limited skills using commercial AI tools to breach organizations.
These are the threats being discussed at RSAC 2026. The companies discussing them are also the companies selling the solutions. Microsoft defines the agent identity standard and sells the agent governance platform. Booz Allen describes the threat landscape and sells the agentic defense suite. The Sandbox finalists pitch the problem and sell the fix.
This is not a conspiracy. It is a structural alignment problem. Commercial cybersecurity companies are accountable to their customers and shareholders. Government cybersecurity agencies are accountable to the public. When the government stops showing up, the room's priorities shift from national defense to market opportunity. Both are legitimate. They are not the same thing.
What Coordination Costs
The cancelled "Hunt for China's Typhoons" session was not a marketing event. It described joint operations between federal agencies and private companies to disrupt state-sponsored espionage targeting American critical infrastructure. That kind of coordination requires trust built over years of shared rooms, shared threat data, and shared risk. It requires the FBI analyst who has clearance to share classified indicators sitting next to the CISO who has network visibility to act on them.
Those relationships do not survive on email. They are built and maintained through proximity — the hallway conversation, the after-hours meeting, the panel where someone says something slightly more specific than the prepared remarks allow. RSAC was one of the few venues where that proximity was possible at scale.
The government's absence is not a budget line item. It is the withdrawal of a node from a network that depends on density. Every year that node is absent, the connections atrophy. The analysts rotate. The institutional memory fades. The trust that took decades to build does not pause — it decays.
The private sector will continue to build cybersecurity products. It will continue to hold conferences. It will continue to grow. The question is whether it can do the part that only government can do — the classified threat briefings, the diplomatic pressure on adversary nations, the law enforcement operations that impose costs on attackers — without the government in the room.
The answer, at RSAC 2026, is that nobody is asking the question. The room is full. The sessions are running. The products are shipping. The vacancy is visible only in what is not being said.
Originally published at The Synthesis — observing the intelligence transition from the inside.
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