Any debilitating attack on our power grid and other critical infrastructure would certainly require the resources of foreign adversaries. The States have no-where near the expertise that our intelligence service's cyber-warriors have; who have trained for years to develop, recognize and thwart sophisticated cyber attacks. Funding States to implement federally mandated and validated protections would be warranted. Funding States to tackle these threats on their own is not. Our federal cyber resources definitely need to be expanded, enhanced, and empowered to act. Our country's political leadership needs to take these threats seriously and so far have not. We value our open society and depend upon our ability to use computer networks to freely communicate and exchange information. The Russians, Chinese and others have exploited our open society for many years by targeting people with poor password practices, those fooled into providing information by fake links, and well, just irresponsible behavior by individuals using critical networks for personal use. These are educational, regulatory and policy issues. Some Chinese manufactured, well made, economical server boards widely used here had been discovered to have 'mystery' chips that can enable Chinese tapping directly into network traffic without having to use some software exploit. For many years, the Russians have played kind of a 'whack-a-mole' probing of our networks that our cyber ops people would respond to with the equivalent of a cyber 'caught you' message and wait for their next attempted exploit. The 2016 Russian election interference was simply a brute-force and massive attack that the Russian's barely tried to disguise; it overwhelmed our cyber warrior's ability to respond as they had in the past and their requests for national leadership to initiate the counter-actions required was not and still are not taken seriously. The point is that these threats to our critical infrastructure are a clear and present danger. There are many possible known attack ‘vectors’ and likely unknown exploits as well. These threats are threats to debilitating our nation's requisite infrastructure and to our nation's ability to respond. This is a national threat which requires national support, national attention and a rational national leadership.

Not until Rick Perry is no longer the Secretary. There is simply too large of a 5th Risk catastrophe. Or get former Secretary Moniz’s endorsement 1st. Excerpt The Fifth Risk former Texas governor Rick Perry. Perry is of course responsible for one of the DOE’s most famous moments—when in a 2011 presidential debate he said he intended to eliminate three entire departments of the federal government. Asked to list them he named Commerce, Education, and . . . then hit a wall. “The third agency of government I would do away with . . . Education . . . the . . . ahhhh . . . ahhh . . . Commerce, and let’s see.” As his eyes bored a hole in his lectern, his mind drew a blank. “I can’t, the third one. I can’t. Sorry. Oops.” The third department Perry wanted to get rid of, he later recalled, was the Department of Energy. In his confirmation hearings to run the department, Perry confessed that when he called for its elimination he hadn’t actually known what the Department of Energy did—and he now regretted having said that it didn’t do anything worth doing. The question on the minds of the people who currently work at the department: Does he know what it does now? In his hearings, Perry made a show of having educated himself. He said how useful it was to be briefed by former secretary Ernest Moniz. But when I asked someone familiar with those briefings how many hours Perry had spent with Moniz, he laughed and said, “That’s the wrong unit of account.” With the nuclear physicist who understood the DOE perhaps better than anyone else on earth Perry had spent minutes, not hours. “He has no personal interest in understanding what we do and effecting change,” a DOE staffer told me in June 2017. “He’s never been briefed on a program—not a single one, which to me is shocking.” Since Perry was confirmed, his role has been ceremonial and bizarre. He pops up in distant lands and tweets in praise of this or that DOE program while his masters inside the White House create budgets to eliminate those very programs. His sporadic public communications have had in them something of the shell-shocked grandmother trying to preside over a pleasant family Thanksgiving dinner while pretending that her blind-drunk husband isn’t standing naked on the dining-room table waving the carving knife over his head. Meanwhile, inside the DOE building, people claiming to be from the Trump administration appeared willy-nilly, unannounced, and unintroduced to the career people. “There’s a mysterious kind of chain from the Trump loyalists who have shown up inside DOE to the White House,” said a career civil servant. “That’s how decisions, like the budget, seem to get made. Not by Perry.” The woman who ran the Obama department’s energy-policy analysis unit received a call from DOE staff telling her that her office was now occupied by Eric Trump’s brother-in-law. Why? No one knew. “Yes, you can notice the difference,” says one young career civil servant, in response to the obvious question. “There’s a lack of professionalism. Over and over again, I was asked by people who worked inside the DOE not to use their names, or identify them in any way, for fear of reprisal. “People are heading for the doors,” says Tarak Shah. “And that’s really sad and destructive. The best and the brightest are the ones being targeted. They will leave fastest. Because they will get the best job offers.”

States do not own the grids. This is a national threat. The government should directly work with the owners of the grids to make sure they are protected.