The Contractor Trap We Keep Walking Into
I’ve spent enough years in federal IT environments to recognize a particular kind of mistake when I see one. It’s not malicious. It’s not even stupid, necessarily. It’s just what happens when people who understand budgets and headcount reduction don’t fully grasp what they’re actually cutting into. The Department of Government Efficiency has been active through 2025 and into 2026, and in that time, it has systematically terminated contracts and reduced staffing across multiple agencies including the Social Security Administration, Treasury, and CISA. Thousands of IT and cybersecurity personnel have left the federal workforce. On paper, that’s a win for cost reduction. In practice, it’s the equivalent of deciding your 1987 Honda Civic needs fewer oil changes to save money.
The calculus looks straightforward from a spreadsheet. A fully loaded federal IT employee costs X. A contractor does similar work for Y. Reduce headcount, increase contractor spend, pocket the difference. Except that federal IT systems don’t work like commercial environments where you can spin up a new team and have them productive in weeks. These are monolithic systems built across decades, maintained by people who understand not just the code but the organizational memory embedded in it. When you remove those people and hand the work to contractors cycling through on two-year engagements, you don’t save money. You defer a much larger cost and guarantee it will arrive when you’re least prepared to handle it.
When Critical Infrastructure Becomes a Training Ground
The incident at the Treasury Department in February 2025 illustrates exactly what I mean. DOGE-affiliated personnel gained access to the Bureau of the Fiscal Service payment systems, which process over 5.45 trillion dollars in annual federal payments. That’s not hyperbole. That’s the actual number. The systems were accessed, and that access triggered congressional oversight hearings. This wasn’t necessarily an intentional breach or a security disaster in the dramatic sense. What it actually was, I suspect, was a gap in the kind of institutional knowledge that prevents disasters. Someone who has worked with these systems for three years knows which access requests don’t make sense. Someone new, working with contractors who are also new, and operating under DOGE directives to streamline and accelerate processes, might not.
The problem with cutting staffing at agencies like Treasury during an acceleration initiative is that you’re creating exactly the conditions for these kinds of incidents. You’re asking people who are already overwhelmed to process changes faster while simultaneously reducing the number of people who understand what those systems actually do. That’s not efficiency. That’s organizational triage, and we’re performing it on systems that keep the government’s financial infrastructure operational.
The Cybersecurity Paradox Nobody Wants to Acknowledge
CISA lost an estimated 130 employees through DOGE-directed reductions in early 2025. To understand why this matters, you have to understand what those 130 people actually did. CISA coordinates federal vulnerability response across civilian agencies. They maintain relationships with private sector security researchers. They track emerging threats. They push patches and coordinate defense strategies when nation-states are actively probing federal networks. This is not work you can offshore or accelerate by removing 20 percent of the people doing it. You simply can’t. CISA workforce reduction coverage – CyberScoop has covered the alarm this triggered among security researchers, and that alarm is warranted.
Former CISA Director Jen Easterly testified in early 2025 that reducing federal cybersecurity staffing during a period of heightened nation-state threat activity from groups like Volt Typhoon was a strategic own goal. I want to sit with that phrase for a moment. That’s measured language from someone who spent years in this space. When a former director describes your policy as scoring against yourself, you should listen. We’re in an era where Chinese threat actors are spending months inside federal networks mapping infrastructure. The threat environment has fundamentally changed. And we’ve responded by reducing the people whose job it is to notice when we’ve been compromised.
The Database That Tells the Real Story
The National Institute of Standards and Technology maintains the National Vulnerability Database, which catalogs known security flaws and coordinates their public disclosure. It’s one of the most critical pieces of infrastructure in the federal security apparatus because it’s the source of truth. When a new vulnerability is discovered, it goes into the NVD. Security teams worldwide rely on that database to understand their exposure. Beginning in early 2024 and continuing through 2025, the NVD experienced a prolonged enrichment backlog. Thousands of CVEs went without proper analysis. That means security teams couldn’t get accurate information about emerging threats because the people who normally provide that information had been reduced or removed.
You can track this in real time at the NIST NVD backlog status tracker. The data is public. The backlog is persistent. And it exists because NIST has faced the same staffing and funding constraints that have hit every other federal security agency. This is what I meant about deferring costs rather than eliminating them. That backlog doesn’t disappear. It just means that when the next major vulnerability is discovered, the analysis and coordination that normally happens in weeks might take months. The vulnerability doesn’t care about your budget cycle.
What We Should Actually Be Learning
I’m not arguing that federal IT spending is optimal. It isn’t. I’ve seen tremendous waste. I’ve seen projects that cost multiples of what they should have. I’ve seen staffing that could be rightsized. But there is a meaningful difference between rightsizing and gutting, and the current approach has confused the two. These systems have spent decades accumulating organizational knowledge, security posture, and institutional memory. You don’t rebuild that quickly, and you certainly don’t rebuild it while you’re still running the same infrastructure 24 hours a day.
The real lesson here isn’t in how to cut federal IT costs effectively. It’s in how to make cuts that create crises you don’t immediately perceive because they unfold across systems too complex for quarterly reporting to capture. The Treasury access incident, the CISA staffing gaps, the NVD backlog, the vulnerability coordination failures waiting to happen when sophisticated threat actors probe networks that aren’t being actively monitored the way they used to be. These aren’t separate problems. They’re symptoms of the same approach to infrastructure management, and they’re going to compound.
I’m interested in your experience here. If you’ve worked in federal IT or federal cybersecurity, I’d want to hear what you’re seeing on the ground. If these cuts have affected systems you work with or depend on, what specific gaps are you noticing? This isn’t abstract policy discussion. It’s operational reality that will shape security posture and infrastructure resilience for years to come.