President-elect Trump was very clear: “I will appoint a team to give me a plan within 90 days of taking office,” he said in January, promising to address cybersecurity after getting a U.S. intelligence assessment of Russian interference in last year’s elections. Trump made the deadline promise repeatedly. A week after the initial statement, he tweeted on Jan. 13, “My people will have a full report on hacking within 90 days!” Yesterday, at the 90-day mark, there is no team, there is no plan, and there is no clear answer from the White House on who would even be working on what, Politico reports. It’s the latest deadline Trump’s set and missed, from the press conference he said his wife would hold last fall to answer questions about her original immigration process to the plan to defeat ISIS that he said would come within his first 30 days in office.
Trump did start early with an event on cybersecurity, convening a meeting on Jan. 31 featuring Rudy Giuliani, who’s leading a group tasked with building private sector partnerships on cybersecurity. “We must protect federal networks and data. We operate these networks on behalf of the American people and they are very important,” Trump said. A spokesperson for the former New York City mayor confirmed that he is not involved in any 90-day report. Experts worry that missing the set deadline could have significant consequences. “It would set an unfortunate precedent to miss the president’s first important cyber-related deadline,” said Michael Sulmeyer of the Harvard Belfer Center’s Cyber Security Project and former director of Cyber Policy Plans and Operations at the Defense Department.