The foundation for modern society in America is under attack. State and local governments, entities that often oversee critical natural resources, schools, and hospital systems, are routinely targeted and breached by state-backed threat actors. Their budgets are simply too slim to provide the digital bulwarks required to fend off such attacks.
The problem is growing. In August, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a joint advisory detailing an “active threat” against Siemens S7 series programmable logic controllers (PLCs), ruggedized industrial devices that read field sensors, execute control logic on a fixed cycle, and drive equipment like valves, motors, and pumps. Siemens S7 PLCs, widely used across industries, are under attack from malicious actors looking to sabotage American infrastructure vital to the functioning of sewers, hospitals, and other industrial operations.
In 2024, Russian-affiliated actors exploited a similar vulnerability, breaching the water system for a small town in Texas, causing the water tank to overflow. The town’s entire revenue in 2023 was $3.37 million, with no dedicated line item for cybersecurity. This was, in effect, a trial run. How and when the detection occurred was an education for the Russians.
American state and local governments are unlikely to organically grow their budgets to the level needed to invest in software that can reliably secure their infrastructure. The U.S. government has a proven option here: clarify that existing tax code already supports increased, iterative purchases of necessary cybersecurity software.
State and local governments are increasingly responsible for cybersecurity, with the same, or even fewer, resources than they had in the past. A plurality of state chief information security officers reported stagnant or reduced cybersecurity budgets for 2026. The picture at the local level is often worse, where a single operator often owns asset inventory, patching, and incident response for an entire utility. The Center for Internet Security in 2024 found that, out of the thousands of local agencies it surveyed, about one-third were doing minimal to no cybersecurity activities. In Minnesota, specifically Braham, Plymouth, South St. Paul, and Maple Plain, threat actors used this to their advantage.
Braham in particular identified $22.98 million in water infrastructure needs, well over 10 times its annual city budget of $2.2 million. A state bond appropriation covered $10.22 million, but the money was earmarked for a wastewater treatment plant upgrade, water main replacement, and well replacement. None of these funds covered the cybersecurity infrastructure needed to secure a plant from a state-backed threat actor: no security software, no network monitoring, no cybersecurity staff. Last month, they were one of many cities and municipalities discovered to have been targeted by actors allegedly acting on behalf of Iran.
State-backed adversaries understand that most of America is like Braham. While Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s cybersecurity efforts are admirable, they are aimed at the upper echelons of the American economy, not the wider array of smaller organizations with similar cybersecurity profiles.