We Fired the Firefighters While the House Was Burning

How We Got Here

DOGE — the Department of Government Efficiency, which was quietly wound down months ahead of its nominal July 2026 end date — cut approximately 387,000 federal workers across the government [8]. CISA's budget was slashed by nearly $500 million. The agency's proposed workforce dropped from 3,292 employees to around 2,324 [3]. The Election Security Program was eliminated entirely. Cyber defense training took a $45 million cut. The National Risk Management Center — which coordinates risk to protect critical infrastructure — lost 35 positions and $70 million. The rationale was efficiency. The government was too big, too slow, too expensive. The people running the cuts would describe any concern as "fearmongering." The critics were dismissed as defenders of the status quo. Here is the status quo as it now stands: GPS systems near Iran are already experiencing disruptions from cyber operations [1]. The agency responsible for defending American digital infrastructure is running on fumes. And DHS, which houses CISA, has been without full congressional funding for weeks. Some Republicans, to their credit, are now sounding the alarm. Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R-NY), chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, said CISA "needs to remain fully operational — and paid — to ensure our nation is ready" [3]. He's right. He's also part of the caucus that cheered the cuts.

Veterans, Taxpayers, Seniors: The Invisible Victims

The cybersecurity story is alarming. But it's the kind of alarm that can feel abstract — nation-states, digital infrastructure, threat assessments. So let me make it concrete with the people you probably don't see in the CISA headlines. At the Department of Veterans Affairs, a VA Office of Inspector General report found 4,434 severe staffing shortages in FY 2025 — a 50 percent increase from the year before [4]. Every single one of the VA's 139 medical centers reported at least some form of severe shortage. Seventy-nine percent reported critical nursing gaps. The VA lost more than 3,000 registered nurses in a single year [5]. Applications for VA nursing positions are down 50 percent compared to last year. The VA Secretary, Doug Collins, has repeatedly insisted that "frontline healthcare" was protected. What he hasn't explained is what happens when the HR staff responsible for hiring those nurses is gone, when the support staff who clean the rooms and deliver the trays and run the labs is gone, and when remaining nurses are doing three jobs because there's nobody left to do the other two. "When we don't have enough staff, we are effectively cutting services to veterans," said a statement from National Nurses United [4]. The organization represents nurses who take care of 9 million veterans in the country's largest integrated health system. Nine. Million. Veterans.

It's not just the VA. The IRS, heading into the 2026 tax season, had onboarded just 50 of the 2,200 additional hires it needed — 2 percent of target [6]. Think about that the next time you wonder why your refund is taking forever. The agency didn't fail to find candidates. The hiring freeze made it nearly impossible to bring them on. At Social Security, employees have been reassigned from IT and policy work to answering phones, because call volumes have surged as a confused and understaffed administration fails to communicate basic benefit information to the seniors who depend on it. Pew Research confirmed that the federal workforce shrank by 10 percent in Trump's first year back in office [7]. The downstream effects — longer wait times, more errors, less accountability — are not hypothetical. They're landing on real people right now.

"We Over-Restructured" — The Most Honest Thing Anyone Has Said

Here's where it gets almost darkly funny, if you're the kind of person who laughs to keep from screaming. Scott Kupor, head of the Office of Personnel Management, admitted to The Washington Post this week that the administration fired too many federal workers and now needs to hire some of them back. "Sometimes you over-restructure," he said [8]. The administration has hired back roughly 123,000 workers to fill the gaps left by 387,000 firings [6]. There's a certain school of thought — gaining some currency this week in certain op-ed pages — that argues all this chaos is just the "natural messiness" of disrupting entrenched bureaucracy. Restructuring is supposed to be painful. Course-correction is part of the process. The long-term vision will eventually emerge from the rubble. I'd find that argument more persuasive if the rubble weren't currently sitting on top of the agency defending us from Iranian cyberattacks. The timing isn't a minor detail. It's the entire point. You do not dismantle your cyber defenses while escalating military conflict with a sophisticated cyber adversary [2]. You do not fire 30,000 VA employees while 9 million veterans are depending on that system for healthcare [9]. You do not let the IRS hiring freeze gut its capacity for tax season and then act surprised when refunds are delayed. These are not abstract risks — they are predictable, foreseeable consequences that multiple experts predicted, loudly, when the cuts were happening.

What Fixing This Actually Looks Like

The administration is now scrambling to rebuild. The "Tech Force" program, a partnership with OpenAI and Meta, is supposed to bring fresh talent into rebuilt agencies [6]. That's fine. That's even a reasonable idea. But you don't rebuild CISA's institutional knowledge — years of threat analysis, critical infrastructure relationships, agency expertise — with a six-month pipeline of recent graduates who've never seen an Iranian IRGC operation. What this actually requires is emergency appropriations and a congressional mandate to prioritize cybersecurity hiring immediately. It requires fully funding DHS so that CISA is not operating on standby fumes. It requires restoring the VA hiring authorities that were frozen, reopening the application pipelines that are now showing 50 percent drops [5], and giving the IRS the resources it needs to process the tax year it's already in the middle of. And it requires — this is the part that never quite makes it into the press releases — an honest accounting of what the cuts cost. Not just in dollars. In wait times. In refunds delayed. In veterans who didn't get appointments. In cyber incidents that might have been caught by the analyst who took the buyout in February.

The Bill Is Coming Due

Government isn't a startup. You can't move fast and break things when the things you're breaking are the agencies that protect people's healthcare, defend their digital infrastructure, and process their taxes. When a startup breaks something, it pivots. When CISA breaks — while Iran is watching — the consequences are not a bad quarter. The people who made these decisions will have explanations. They'll point to the "Tech Force" initiative, to the rehiring, to the "course-correction" that proves the system is working. What they won't point to is the nurse who left the VA and moved to a private hospital because she couldn't do her job anymore [9]. Or the veteran waiting six extra weeks for an appointment. Or the CISA analyst on standby, watching alerts populate in a system with nobody to investigate them, waiting for a phone call that may not come before something goes very wrong. Efficiency is a virtue. But efficiency that leaves you defenseless isn't efficiency. It's negligence with a better marketing budget.