The Infrastructure You Cannot Rebuild Quickly
I have spent enough years working with large systems to know that cutting infrastructure during a crisis is like removing rivets from a bridge while traffic is still crossing it. The Department of Government Efficiency’s approach to federal IT since early 2025 reveals something I rarely see articulated clearly in policy circles: the difference between spending and investment. Spending is fungible. Investment in security infrastructure, particularly the human expertise that monitors and responds to threats, is not.
When DOGE-directed reductions hit agencies like the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the Treasury Department, and Social Security Administration, the impact was not distributed evenly. The cuts fell heaviest on specialized technical roles, the ones that take years to fill with competent personnel. CISA workforce reduction coverage – CyberScoop documented that the agency lost approximately 130 employees through these reductions in early 2025. That number does not rebound quickly through new hiring cycles. Each person carried institutional knowledge, relationship networks with industry partners, and understanding of federal systems that cannot be compressed into an onboarding document.
What Happens When Vulnerability Data Goes Stale
The National Institute of Standards and Technology maintains the National Vulnerability Database, a system that tracks every publicly disclosed security weakness in commercial software. It is unglamorous work. It is also foundational. When the NIST NVD began experiencing significant enrichment backlogs in early 2024, continuing through 2025, thousands of newly disclosed vulnerabilities entered a kind of institutional limbo. They were identified publicly, but the detailed analysis that helps organizations understand severity and priority sat waiting. You can view the scope of this problem directly: NIST NVD backlog status tracker.
This matters more than the headlines suggest. Organizations depend on NIST analysis to prioritize patching decisions. In a world where you cannot patch everything immediately, vulnerability severity scoring is the mechanism by which risk gets allocated. When that database runs months behind, the entire downstream security ecosystem loses timing data. You patch based on internal threat models and vendor guidance instead of authoritative federal assessment. For large enterprises this creates friction. For smaller organizations, it creates blind spots.
The February Treasury Incident and What It Revealed
In February 2025, a troubling incident emerged from the Treasury Department. Personnel affiliated with DOGE gained access to the Bureau of the Fiscal Service payment systems, the infrastructure that processes over 5.45 trillion dollars in annual federal payments. The incident triggered congressional oversight hearings and raised immediate questions about access controls, personnel vetting, and whether cutting security staffing had degraded the agency’s ability to monitor unusual access patterns.
What makes this incident instructive is not the access itself, but what it signals about reduced oversight capacity. Large payment systems have multiple detection layers: automated alerts, human review, audit trails, and escalation procedures. Each of these requires staffing. When you reduce that staffing in the name of efficiency, you are betting that nothing will go wrong. The Treasury incident suggests that bet did not hold. The pattern of access was eventually identified, suggesting systems are working. But whether earlier detection would have been possible with full staffing remains an open question that congressional investigators are now asking publicly.
Nation-State Threats Do Not Pause for Budget Cycles
Former CISA Director Jen Easterly testified in early 2025 that reducing federal cybersecurity staffing during a period of heightened nation-state threat activity was a strategic own goal. She was speaking specifically about adversaries like Volt Typhoon, sophisticated state-sponsored actors conducting multi-year reconnaissance campaigns against critical infrastructure. These actors do not operate on the same fiscal calendar as Congress. They do not reduce operations when federal budgets tighten.
The timing of the DOGE reductions, viewed against the external threat environment, reveals a fundamental misalignment. Vulnerability coordination, threat intelligence analysis, and incident response are force-multiplier activities. One expert analyst can coordinate defenses across dozens of organizations. Reduce the analysts and you reduce the multiplier. The threat does not shrink to match your reduced capacity. It continues at whatever level the adversary chooses. What changes is your ability to see it clearly.
What Comes Next: The Forecast
Here is what I expect we will see in the remainder of 2025 and into 2026. First, incident detection will slow. This is not speculation. It is a mechanical consequence of reduced staffing in security operations centers and threat coordination teams. Some incidents will still be caught, often by the vendors affected or by organizations affected directly. Others will be caught later, after more lateral movement has occurred.
Second, the vulnerability database backlog will create a cascading problem. Organizations will develop workarounds. Some will rely more heavily on vendor patching guidance and less on the federal database. Others will develop internal scoring systems. This fragmentation reduces the common operating picture that federal vulnerability coordination is supposed to provide. It is not a catastrophic failure. It is a degradation.
Third, we will see pressure to rehire for specialized roles that proved difficult to backfill. Budget reductions often leave hiring freezes in place even when circumstances change. The administrative burden of reverse-engineering what was cut and rebuilding it exceeds the original process of cutting it. This creates lag time where capabilities remain degraded even after policy shifts.
What I cannot forecast with confidence is whether major incidents will occur that trace directly to these reductions. Major security incidents are overdetermined. They result from multiple failures, not one. It would be difficult to prove that a specific breach would not have happened with full staffing. But the probabilistic argument is sound: reduce defensive capacity and you increase breach probability.
This is not an argument for unlimited spending or for treating government agencies as exempt from accountability. It is an argument for understanding what you are cutting when you cut it. Infrastructure cuts feel like cost reduction. They often are cost transfers, pushing problems downstream to organizations that must now manage risks previously mitigated at the federal level. If you have worked through a major incident, you know how expensive that transfer becomes.