By Alexandra Alper
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The White House is urging federal agencies to refrain from laying off their cybersecurity teams, as they scramble to comply with a Thursday deadline to submit mass layoff plans to slash their budgets, according to an email seen by Reuters.
Greg Barbaccia, the United States federal chief information officer, sent the message on Wednesday, in response to questions about whether cybersecurity employees’ work is national security-related, and therefore exempt from layoffs.
“We believe cybersecurity is national security and we encourage Department-level Chief Information Officers to consider this when reviewing their organizations,” he wrote in the email to information technology employees across the federal government which has not been previously reported.
Describing “skilled cyber security professionals” as playing “a vital role in mission delivery and information assurance,” he said, “We are confident federal agencies will be able to identify efficiencies across their non-cyber mission areas without negatively affecting their agency’s cyber posture,” he added.
The Office of Management and Budget, which is part of the White House, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
But the email reflects growing concern that the deep cuts mandated by President Donald Trump and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk could harm the United States’ ability to combat cybersecurity threats.
In testimony earlier this month, a former cybersecurity director at the National Security Agency, Rob Joyce, said the mass culling of workers from federal payrolls would have a “devastating” impact on cybersecurity and national security.
The approach by the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency has raised extraordinary concerns of its own, with cybersecurity experts and former government officials alleging that unrestricted access to government systems could open the door to hackers and leaks.
At the Social Security Administration, for instance, DOGE was awarded unusually broad access to some of the agency’s most sensitive data over the objections of senior officials. In a declaration submitted earlier this month in a lawsuit against the agency by a group of unions, a department staffer who recently exited said she did not believe that DOGE associates were up to the task of protecting the data they won access to and that, “in such a chaotic environment, the risk of data leaking into the wrong hands is significant.”
As of February 14, more than 130 positions had been cut from the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, according to CISA.
(Reporting by Alexandra Alper in Washington; Additional reporting by Raphael Satter in Washington; Editing by Chris Sanders and Matthew Lewis)
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