President Donald Trump on Friday, June 6th, signed a new executive order aimed at strengthening United States cybersecurity. This new directive primarily focuses on amending what the administration calls “problematic elements” of orders from the Biden and Obama administrations. The White House stated the order aims to improve software development, border gateway security, and post-quantum cryptography implementation. It also seeks to improve AI security, Internet of Things security, the use of encryption, and various existing U.S. sanctions policies. Specifically, the new executive order from President Trump targets Executive Order 14144, which President Biden had signed in January 2025 just before leaving office.
The executive order signed by President Trump last week completely strikes out and replaces several key subsections of the prior EO 14144.
One section that was entirely removed from the previous order had covered the important use of modern digital identity documents for citizens. This section had encouraged the acceptance of digital identity documents to access various public benefits programs that require identity verification. The White House explained that this order strips away what it considers inappropriate measures that are outside of a core cybersecurity focus. They claimed it removed a mandate for government-issued digital IDs for illegal aliens that would have facilitated entitlement fraud and other abuses.
The Better Identity Coalition, however, expressed its strong disappointment in the White House’s decision to repeal this particular important section.
The organization has stated that the removed section actually had very strong bipartisan support and was praised by cybersecurity and fraud experts. In terms of software security compliance, the Biden executive order had mandated certain attestations for all federal government software contractors. The new executive order from the Trump administration now officially removes these specific software security attestation requirements for all federal contractors. The new order also significantly simplifies the existing government roadmap for implementing future post-quantum cryptography, removing some specific collaboration requirements.
Regarding artificial intelligence security, President Biden’s previous policy had promoted important AI defense collaboration and also extensive valuable dataset sharing. In contrast, President Trump’s executive order now refocuses these AI cybersecurity efforts primarily towards identifying and managing various potential system vulnerabilities. The new executive order also makes significant changes to Executive Order 13694, which President Obama originally signed back in the year 2015. This older order had enabled authorities to sanction entities that conduct significant cyberattacks against the United States of America. The new order changes the phrasing from “any person” to “any foreign person,” limiting the application of these powerful sanctions.
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