Cybersecurity agency’s top recruits decimated by DOGE cuts

CBS News — For Kelly Shaw, unemployment is unfamiliar territory. “I’ve never been in this situation before. I’ve never been fired,” Shaw said, suddenly quiet, while seated at her kitchen table in Northern Virginia.

Nearly three years ago, the longtime senior intelligence analyst left the Navy, after being recruited by the nation’s top cyber defense agency and rising up through the ranks. Eventually, Shaw helped establish a congressionally mandated program designed to continuously monitor and detect cyber breaches of the nation’s power grid, pipelines and water system – installing sensors across critical infrastructure designed to detect insider threats and foreign adversaries like China, Russia and Iran.

“It was all about the information we can get within networks to find the bad guys – any indicators of compromise, evidence of the adversary, moving through a network and attempting to do bad things. That’s what we did,” Shaw said, pausing. “Well, that’s what some will still do.”

The former manager for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency’s “CyberSentry” program, Shaw was also among the 130 probationary CISA workers mass fired in the “Valentine’s Day Massacre” during the holiday weekend last month.

That weekend, the form letter termination notices arrived for over 4% of CISA’s workforce, telling them they were “not fit for continued employment because your ability, knowledge and skills do not fit the Agency’s current needs.” Among them were the nation’s threat hunters, incident response team members, disabled veterans and employees who’d already signed onto the federal government’s deferred resignation program.

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