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DOGE axes CISA 'red team' staffers amid ongoing federal cuts:
Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has fired more than a hundred employees working for the U.S. government's cybersecurity agency CISA, including "red team" staffers, two people affected by the layoffs told TechCrunch.
The people, who asked not to be named, said affected employees were axed immediately when their network access was revoked with no prior warning.
The layoffs, which happened in late February and early March, are the latest round of staff cuts to hit the federal cybersecurity agency since the start of the Trump administration.
CISA spokesperson Tess Hyre declined to comment on the latest round of job cuts affecting the agency and wouldn't say how many employees had been affected. Hyre told TechCrunch that CISA's red team "remains operational" but said the agency is "reviewing all contracts to ensure that they align with the priorities of the new administration."
One of the people affected told TechCrunch that CISA red team employees, who simulate real-world attacks to identify security weaknesses in networks before attackers do, were affected by the DOGE-enforced cuts.
Another person affected by the layoffs, who asked to remain anonymous due to fear of government retaliation, told TechCrunch that laid-off employees also include staffers who worked for CISA's Cyber Incident Response Team (CIRT), which is responsible for penetration testing and vulnerability management of networks belonging to U.S. federal government departments and agencies.
[...] This is by our count the third known round of job cuts to affect CISA employees since January 20. More than 130 CISA employees were cut by DOGE earlier in February, according to reports, and several CISA employees working on election security were placed on leave in January.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by zocalo on Wednesday March 12, @09:31PM (11 children)
The CEO decides to cut costs and tells HR to do that through a reduction in headcount. HR crunches the numbers and tells your boss to reduce headcount by 10%, possibly even picking the team(s) to axe. Your boss (possibly after some futile protests) picks out the unlucky ones and gives them the bad news. Your department literally gets decimated. Who was ultimately responsible for the layoffs?
What's happending with DOGE is buck-passing using semantics so everyone gets to blame who they want to blame, but where the process started that led to the layoffs should be pretty clear to anyone. When Google, Facebook, or whoever, announce mass layoffs and we discuss it here, I don't recall anyone ever blaming the line mangers - it's always the CEO, so why should DOGE get a pass just because they're not officially in the "chain of command"?
And that's a whole other issue. DOGE are NOT in the chain of command, so when they get around to the military (which they surely must to meet their targets) the correct response should be "GTFO", shouldn't it?
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Mykl on Wednesday March 12, @09:39PM (6 children)
DOGE won't go after the military. It would be too unpopular with the MAGA base.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 13, @03:40AM (3 children)
The military itself, but what about military contractors?
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Thursday March 13, @05:29AM
They probably _should_ have a really close look at all of those Military and other Government contracts, but will probably not peer too closely as they will be attached to friends or donors.
And while eliminating a few juicy contracts might reduce Government spending, it won't reduce the size of the Public Service, which is what I think the real point is.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday March 13, @10:36AM (1 child)
I'm no expert, but I'm reasonably confident that any contracts that might exist between the DoD and either Tesla or SpaceX or the Boring Company will either not be touched by DOGE, or actually increased a bit. Because "efficiency", or something.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 3, Informative) by ElizabethGreene on Thursday March 13, @01:53PM
AFAIK, the Boring company has precisely zero Federal contracts. SpaceX does have Federal contracts, taken via competitive bid, and their competitors regularly complain that their prices are too low. [1]
[1] - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/europe-complains-spacex-rocket-prices-121300737.html [yahoo.com]
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Thursday March 13, @12:51PM (1 child)
MAGA doesn't care one bit until it affects them directly. https://www.military.com/daily-news/2025/03/05/va-plans-fire-83000-employees-musks-help-eliminating-pact-act-staffing-increase.html [military.com]
They're still cheering.
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Thursday March 13, @09:11PM
The VA is ex-military, and are generally anti-war
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Wednesday March 12, @10:45PM (3 children)
The CEO here is Trump not DOGE. If "it's always the CEO", then DOGE gets a pass by your own reasoning. And it's a thing for a CEO to "decide to cut costs" and bring in an outside contractor to do the selecting/axing. On the axing, I've heard of contractors who are hired solely to tell a bunch of people they're fired (met one person who did that for a few years before they got laid off themselves during the dotcom burst).
The problem is Trump is in the chain of command - at the top.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 13, @03:57AM
That's extremely common in all businesses, and not just as a contractor. There are C-level executives whose whole career is being hired as a executive/manager, working for a while to give them credibility with the 'masses", firing whatever portion of the workforce is deemed unwanted, then being "fired" by the CEO/Board to try and appease/reassure those still working.
I believe the thinking is that if the current manager is the one who fired a bunch of people, then all the staff will start looking for jobs, naturally the better staff will find other jobs and leave the company full of deadwood. The method above supposedly gets rid of staff without panicking all the good staff into leaving too.
I had a relative who did that as a job at the CEO level. He would be hired to "replace" a "failing" (but popular) CEO and would spend somewhere from 6 months to 2 years initiating unpopular reforms and/or mass sackings. He would then be removed by the board and quite often the previous CEO (who was in on it) would come back after a nice holiday paid for by his golden parachute.
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Thursday March 13, @08:18AM (1 child)
As for the military, yes, Trump is the Commander in Chief. From there the chain of command explicitly passes down through the senior ranks to the lower ones, so that everyone, from the most junior rank up, can draw a clear line through that chain to the President. None of those lines take a detour through DOGE, and orders or "suggestions" outside the chain of command are illegal by definition, are they not? Contractors and pork projects are probably fair game, but how how far does that cover extend - everything under the DoD? Do any other federal agencies have similar frameworks? Either way, my understanding is that a good chunk of the federal "staff" are completely protected from DOGE's efforts unless the order is signed by Trump personally, which means either Trump will have to man up and take responsibility or there are going to have to be deeper cuts made where it's possible for DOGE to do so autonomously.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 13, @12:24PM
They wouldn't be outside the chain of command because once again, it would be under the authority of Trump. The rest of your post is irrelevant. This would be far from the first time that a presidential order/act had unintended consequences or a president weren't fully informed of those consequences - or merely appeared to be so uninformed.
Trump has played that game before: relying on Director Anthony Fauci to coordinate the US response to the covid pandemic while simultaneously using him as a blame sink for Trump's failures to properly handle the same. DOGE's achievements will be credited to Trump, their failings will be their own.