Alexandra Bortz remembers being “that kid” at her high school on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in the early 2000s.
The one whose father brought her by bus for orientation on Sept. 10, 2001, insisting on helping carry her things and embarrassing her with a goodbye kiss.
The one whose father didn’t come home the next day. Or ever again.
Download the Straight Arrow app today to get the stories that matter free from manipulation, bias or agenda.
Point phone camera here
On Sept. 11, Victor Wald went to his new job at Avalon Partners, a small brokerage firm on the 84th floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center. He was last seen nearly 50 stories below, resting on the stairs just before the building collapsed.
Her father’s death in the most devastating terrorist attack in U.S. history not only shaped Bortz’s teenage years, it helped define the adult she became.
Twenty-five years after the 9/11 attacks, many children of victims have chosen careers that honor their fathers and mothers. Sons and daughters joined the New York Police Department, which lost 23 officers on 9/11, or the Fire Department of New York, which suffered the loss of 343 firefighters.
Bortz took a different approach. She has devoted her career to making sure an event like 9/11 never happens again.
“I could look at the event in two ways,” Bortz told Straight Arrow one recent morning during her commute from her Maryland home to her Virginia office. “I could look at what happened to me personally; but also as a student of history, looking at it as a geopolitical event and what were the causes and the intelligence failures that led to it.”
That duality of thought led Bortz to a job at the Department of Homeland Security, working to help prevent cybersecurity wars.
“I try to live most of my life in a way that would make my dad proud,” Bortz said. “Who I chose to marry, how I raise my kids, how I value family are all inspired by him. This also includes what I chose to do for a living. 9/11… was preventable and caused by a slew of U.S. government failures. Instead of sitting there and being angry about it, I decided to try and be part of the solution by way of joining the Department of Homeland Security.”
But as the 25th anniversary of 9/11 approached, Bortz left her government post for the private sector. She fears the U.S. is ill-equipped to face the next ruinous attack, particularly after massive cuts at an agency intended to prevent it.
Invisible warfare
After graduating from high school in 2005, Bortz decided to move South. She majored in political science at Vanderbilt University in Nashville before earning a master’s in internal relations from American University — just as her father had.
Bortz joined Homeland Security in 2018, during President Donald Trump’s first administration. She was assigned to a section that was later renamed the Cyber Infrastructure and Security Agency. CISA, as the agency is known, is charged with protecting the nation against attacks on critical infrastructure.
“I really do think of it as a mission,” Bortz said.
Within CISA, she worked several jobs, all in a mission-support capacity, including managing the procurement of cybersecurity tools for agencies throughout the government.
Over the past 25 years, people have become accustomed to walking through metal detectors when they visit government buildings or go to concerts or sporting events. They know to remove their shoes at airport security checkpoints and to show their IDs to Transportation Security Administration agents.
Cybersecurity does not have the same physical presence.
“You don’t really see it,” Bortz said. “You don’t really see what the government is spending tens of millions of dollars on.”
The invisibility can make the threat difficult to comprehend, until it becomes all too real.
“Imagine if they shut down the power system and we don’t have electricity,” Bortz said. “So street lights would stop, people can’t travel, you can’t get gasoline, your groceries will go bad. Maybe communication lines could go down, and you can’t reach people or get the news. That would be terrifying. The lack of food. It could really dissolve into chaos.”
This isn’t necessarily a hypothetical. In July, the Cyber Infrastructure and Security Agency, the FBI and other agencies issued a joint warning about an Iranian cyber threat that could be targeting U.S. organizations and water systems. Officials said critical systems were imperiled.
Such attacks are attractive to the nation’s adversaries, Bortz said.
“Because you don’t have to build tanks and ships,” she said. “And you don’t have to have people die, get deployed. You can sit by your computer and you can do extensive damage. And anyone can do it. It doesn’t even have to be a state-sponsored personnel. Could be anybody.”
In the years since 9/11, Bortz said, cyberattacks have emerged as “one of the biggest vulnerabilities and biggest targets that we have in this country.”
And artificial intelligence, she believes, is accelerating these invisible wars.
“It might become even scarier,” she said. “With the introduction of AI … it’s moving faster and with greater expertise than before.”
‘Politicized’
During her early days at CISA, Bortz said, “it was a bipartisan effort and heavily supported,” Bortz said. “It’s important. It should be a bipartisan issue. We should all care about it.”
But then CISA became a target itself.
After the 2020 presidential election, which Trump falsely claimed was stolen from him, CISA publicly declared the election the most secure in American history. That led to fierce criticism from Trump and some of his allies.
“What happened, in my opinion, is it became politicized,” Bortz said.
“When CISA declared that there hadn’t been any election tampering in 2020 … that was pretty much a bullet mark put on the agency, unfortunately,” she said.
When Trump returned to office last year, CISA found itself on the chopping block. It came under scrutiny from the cost-cutting effort led by Trump supporter Elon Musk, known as the Department of Government Efficiency.
In the first half of 2025, CISA lost about one-third of its workforce — roughly 1,000 employees. In his budget proposal for the next fiscal year, Trump calls for cutting another 900 workers.
“It was unfortunate to see CISA over the past year and a half get really gutted with DOGE and everything,” Bortz said. “We lost a third of our people, which is scary because I do think that this is something that we should be putting more people to and more education towards, because there’s definitely an education gap there and a skill gap there.”
“I have worked with tremendously smart and talented people who could be making a lot more money in the private sector but chose to work for the government in order to serve this country,” she said. “In an already thankless job, the onslaught over the last year and a half was too much for many people, and the government unfortunately lost a lot of talent as a result.”
Private sphere
In 2025, Bortz left the federal government. She said the decision to leave the government was “one of the hardest, most gut-wrenching things I have ever done.”
“When I took the oath of federal service eight years ago, I was so incredibly proud of myself and saw my entire career playing out as a public servant,” she said. “I made the difficult decision to leave.”
Return-to-office mandates from DOGE would have made her commute very long, and she would have missed time with her two young daughters.
“My dad died in his office building,” she said. “Work-life balance is incredibly important to me, I would say, as a result. I decided to do the next best thing, which was join the private sector and continue supporting the mission from there.”
But she worries that diminished security agencies aren’t fully up to the task of protecting Americans.
As the 25th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, Bortz sees a parallel between the intelligence failures ahead of the attacks and the lack of preparedness now for cyber threats.
“If agencies across the government, if their cyber offices are getting gutted, these people are overworked,” she said. “They do their best, but even when I was a government employee, I had 10 different roles. And then there’s only so much you can do.”
As the 9/11 Commission documented, “we basically had all of the information” before the attacks, Bortz said. “There could be a gap of what gets communicated or what gets caught.”
A continuing presence
A quarter-century after 9/11, Bortz’s father is still very much present in her life.
Victor Wald was a stockbroker, but Bortz’s mother once said he may have missed his calling. He had a facility with foreign languages and a passion for studying Judaica. On Sept. 11, the day after he took his daughter to high school orientation, he was 49 years old. When the plane hit his building, he began the long descent from the 84th floor. A stranger who encountered him struggling down the stairs stopped to help him. Both died when the building collapsed.
Wald was last seen reciting a Jewish prayer. His prayer shawl, later recovered from the rubble, is now displayed at the National Sept. 11 Memorial & Museum in New York.
Bortz sees her father as more than a victim of historic attack. He was the person she turned to with heartbreak, anxiety and the ordinary problems of being a teenager.
His death changed the course of her life.
“My dad’s loss rocked my family and we were never the same,” Bortz said. “His absence is heavily felt, especially during life’s milestones where you know he should and would want to be there. This is still so very much alive for us.”