It was “incredibly helpful in not having this escalate into a big sort of event,” Raymond says.
A few years ago, the town might not have had that plan. When the state evaluated some local governments’ cybersecurity in 2020, it found “people were doing the minimum, or, in some cases, not the minimum,” Raymond recalls.
Some local governments had virus protection and data backups, and some large towns were doing well on cyber. But most local governments were struggling. Plenty of towns were using equipment too old to be patched, and failed to conduct phishing tests — which train employees to be alert to phishing attacks — or to use multifactor authentication. Almost none had detailed plans in place for responding to cyber attacks.
Then the State and Local Cybersecurity Grant Program (SLCGP) launched. Passed as part of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, it was designed to provide $1 billion from 2022-2025 for state and local cybersecurity needs. The bulk of the funds were funneled from states to local governments through direct subgrants, shared services or other methods, and provided much-needed resources to help cities, towns and counties shore up their defenses.
“[The grant] ensured that the majority of the funds went to those who needed it most,” Raymond says, with 80 percent designated for local governments and 25 percent for rural communities.
States who received these grants still have up to three years to spend their awards. But the future of the popular program is uncertain. Congress passed a law in February extending the State and Local Cybersecurity Grant Program through September 2026, but did not provide new funding. Two bills would reauthorize the program, one bill from last November extending it through fiscal year 2026, the other bill from last September for several more years. But as of April 2026, neither has cleared both chambers.
Raymond says having these grant funds has meant Connecticut and its partners could go beyond discussing best practices for local governments and start providing them with real resources. One of the first steps Connecticut took was helping local governments make incident response plans, which detail what members of an organization will do in the event of a hack. The state also offered services to local governments like multifactor authentication, which creates extra protection from hackers, and endpoint detection and response, which continuously monitors devices for threats and then remediates them.
Importantly, Raymond says, the grant program also called for everyone to periodically assess their cybersecurity, helping organizations stay informed about what they need to improve. The program “is dramatically needed, and it has been very impactful,” Raymond says.
Louisville Ramps Up Its Defenses
For Louisville Metro Government in Kentucky, receiving a subgrant meant its cyber team could take bolder steps to improve its defenses, says CIO Chris Seidt.
“A lot of our cyber initiatives had mainly been focused on the day-to-day operational aspects of defending the network, responding to incidents. … We really just felt like we were in a reactive mode,” Seidt says. With the grant funds, Louisville took a more proactive approach.
The city-county created two new positions: a “red teamer” and a threat intelligence specialist. The former is responsible for thinking like a hacker and searching Louisville’s network for exploitable weaknesses — then alerting the government so it can fix the issues before a real hacker discovers and takes advantage of them.
Organizations without such a role tend to rely on third-party services, which might come around every few years and run an assessment of their security. But the on-staff red teamer is testing the local government’s systems every day. Over more than a year and a half, the staff member has been sniffing out vulnerabilities, and the team prioritizes fixing them.
“Is there a specific incident that we headed off?” Seidt says. “I don’t believe so, but that’s the point — we don’t necessarily want to get to a place where we’re going to have an incident.”
Louisville’s new threat intelligence specialist, meanwhile, establishes relationships with public- and private-sector partners that can prove important when an attack hits. Grant money will sustain the two roles through the end of 2026, after which Seidt hopes to get general funds approved to maintain them.
The Cyber Need That Remains
Cybersecurity is an ever-evolving challenge and IT officials say a renewed, and longer, grant program would be a great help.
“States and local governments were never set up to be fighting international adversaries, but that’s what we find ourselves doing today,” Raymond says.
At the same time, state and local governments have fewer resources for the fight. Significant staffing declines at the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency mean fewer people available to help. Plus, governments used to be able to get free cybersecurity services through a federally funded organization called the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center, but the federal government cut funding for it at the end of last year.
The House passed a grant renewal bill, called the PILLAR Act, in November 2025 that would provide funds through fiscal year 2033. That bill hasn’t cleared the Senate, however. That same month, the Senate introduced its own bill that would reauthorize the SLCGP for fiscal year 2026; as of April 2026, the bill had not advanced.
Should a grant be reauthorized, IT leaders have big plans for what to do with the money.
Raymond would like to launch a statewide security operations center to provide local governments with 24/7 threat monitoring and vulnerability scanning. Meanwhile, Seidt is concerned about additional risks posed by AI, which is being used to power cyber attacks. He wants to equip Louisville with similarly powerful defense tools.
There are some tweaks IT officials recommend for a future program. Raymond believes setting a consistent level of cost share between federal and state and local governments — instead of one that changes each year — would make accounting easier for local governments. (The PILLAR Act does this.) He also says extending the grant for more years would give opportunities to local governments who couldn’t come up with their cost share in time to participate.
Above all, officials are glad for the funding that’s gone out so far and hopeful to see it renewed, in any form.
“We’re certainly better off for having gone through the program,” Seidt says.
