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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The people, who asked not to be named, said affected employees were axed immediately when their network access was revoked with no prior warning.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: 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.