OPM Director Resigns Over Massive Cyber Breach of Employee Records

OPM Director Katherine
 Archuleta Resigns

Today in Washington. D.C. - July 10, 2015
OPM Director Katherine Archuleta has resigned. Her departure comes less than 24 hours after GOP leaders called for President Obama to fire her. The House Republican leadership quickly noted, "“The resignation of the OPM director does not in any way absolve the president of the responsibility to repair this damage to our national security. We know from last year’s resignation of the VA secretary that a change in personnel does not always lead to real change. We applaud the work of Chairman Chaffetz and the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and we will hold the president accountable for restoring the public’s confidence.” More on this below.

The House reconvened today at 9 AM. It passed (344- 77) H.R. 6 — 21st Century Cures Act - "To accelerate the discovery, development, and delivery of 21st century cures, and for other purposes." Seventy Republicans voted against the bill with the Arkansas delegation split 50/50 with Crawford and Westerman voting no and Hill and Womack voting yes.

House adjourned at 12:15 PM and will reconvene at Noon on Monday.

Yesterday the House passed H.R. 2647 (262-167) — "To expedite under the National Environmental Policy Act and improve forest management activities in units of the National Forest System derived from the public domain, on public lands under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management, and on tribal lands to return resilience to overgrown, fire-prone forested lands, and for other purposes."

The Senate is not in session today and will reconvene on Monday at 3 PM, when it will resume consideration of S. 1177, the Every Child Achieves Act of 2015.

Sometimes we must wonder why the Senate doesn't keep working and vote up or down all the various bills the people's House sends to the Senate.

Yesterday, the Senate voted on 3 amendments to S. 1177 and agreed to 6 others by voice vote.

Also yesterday, the Senate voted 81-15 to invoke cloture on the motion to go to conference with the House on H.R. 1735, the Fiscal Year 2016 Defense Authorization bill (NDAA). The Senate then agreed by voice vote to the motion to insist on its amendment and go to conference with the House on H.R. 1735. One of those "tale it or leave it situations.

Senators then voted 44-52 to reject a motion by Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI) to instruct conferees to insist that Budget Control Act spending caps be eliminated or increased for both military and domestic spending.

The AP reports, “The head of the U.S. government's personnel office resigned abruptly on Friday, bowing to bipartisan calls for her to step down following a massive government data breach on her watch.

“Katherine Archuleta, director of the federal Office of Personnel Management, submitted her resignation to President Barack Obama on Friday morning, the White House said. She'll be replaced on a temporary basis by the agency's deputy director, Beth Cobert, who will step into the role on Saturday.

“Less than 24 hours earlier, Archuleta had rebuffed demands that she resign, telling reporters she had no intention of leaving and that her agency was doing everything it could to address concerns about the safety of data in its hands. But on Friday morning, Archuleta told Obama it was best for her to step aside to let new leadership respond to the recent braches and to improve systems to lessen risks in the future, according to a White House official who wasn't authorized to be quoted on the matter and spoke on condition of anonymity.”

National Journal adds, “OPM announced Thursday that the size of a hack that began last year led to the pilfering of sensitive personal information of 21.5 million former and current employees. That admission, following weeks of scrutiny on Capitol Hill after OPM acknowledge a separate data breach that affected 4.2 million, led to a rush of lawmakers who called for her ousting, including the top three House Republicans and Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee.”

Roll Call notes, “Members of Congress, who have torched Archuleta from both sides of the aisle over the unprecedented breach, sounded happy she’s out.

“‘This is the absolute right call,’ said House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah. “OPM needs a competent, technically savvy leader to manage the biggest cybersecurity crisis in this nation’s history. ‘The IG has been warning about security lapses at OPM for almost a decade. This should have been addressed much, much sooner but I appreciate the President doing what’s best now. In the future, positions of this magnitude should be awarded on merit and not out of patronage to political operatives.’

“Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, also praised the move as ‘one that will help to restore confidence in an agency that not only poorly defended sensitive data of millions of Americans but struggled to respond to repeated intrusions. …’”

Earlier this week, FBI Director James Comey discussed the size and seriousness of this breach . . . describing the theft as an ‘enormous breach’ during testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, said his own personal information was stolen as part of the intrusion, which Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has said likely was carried out by Chinese hackers. . . . ‘It is a very, very big number,’ he said of the number of Americans whose data was stolen. ‘It is a huge deal.’”

On Wednesday, the USA Today editors expressed their frustration with this state of affairs. “Hackers, whom government officials have linked to China, broke into computers at OPM and stayed there undetected for months, downloading vast amounts of information on millions of current and former federal employees. The hackers took millions of the forms used by people to disclose intimate details of their lives for national security clearances. The information could be used to unmask covert agents or to try to blackmail Americans into spying for an enemy. . . .

“Government employees have received letters promising them 18 months of credit monitoring services. That's cold comfort to people whose clearances contained information about drug abuse, money troubles, affairs, mental health treatment and other sensitive information.

“Michael Hayden, the former head of the NSA and the CIA, told The Wall Street Journal that the embarrassing theft was ‘a tremendously big deal.’ How did it happen? ‘Raw incompetence,’ he said. That sounds about right.”

They concluded, “If the government isn't going to play offense — or isn't going to publicize it if it does — it's going to have to get much better at defense. This situation simply cannot continue. Whether it's the rollout of the Obamacare website or these attacks on an unforgivably vulnerable computer system, the administration seems to need a disaster before it wakes up and gets technology right. It certainly has another one on its hands now.”

A good start would be for Congress to pass a bipartisan cybersecurity bill that allows companies to share information with the government to more quickly address hacks and breaches. Unfortunately, Senate Democrats filibustered this bill a month ago. .

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