UPDATE: July 10, 2015, 12:43 PM EDT
WASHINGTON (AP) — The head of the government’s personnel office has resigned in the wake of a massive data breach on her watch.
A White House official says President Barack Obama accepted the resignation of Office of Personnel Management Director Katherine Archuleta on Friday morning. She’ll stay on the job through the end of the day.
The official says deputy director Beth Cobert will become acting director starting Saturday.
Archuleta’s resignation comes the day after her agency disclosed that hackers stole the personal information of more than 21 million people. Previous government estimates of how many were affected by the breach were far smaller.
Members of Congress in both parties had demanded Archuleta’s resignation.
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I’m tired of people like her getting dumped on. The U.S. government is, as are most state, county and city governments, digitally dysfunctional. Since computers first became a part of normal office life, the U.S. government has had multiple incompatible systems across federal agencies with no group tasked with (or allowed) to assure this didn’t happen or could, at the very least, be managed. How can she possibly be held accountable for failures in computer security when she does not have the authority to upgrade the system without a special budget request?
It’s like all the Clinton haters who tried make the attack on the U.S.S. Cole the president’s failing. Securing a ship in a hostile port (no Yemen is not an ally) is no more the president’s responsibility than making the firewall for an outdated computer system is the responsibility of the administrative head of any government bureaucracy. Major corporation have IT staff for this. The U.S. government doesn’t.
This is just political pandering at its worst. By all the press I read, she was doing her best to correct the security flaws her predecessors had allowed. When doing the right thing is no protection, we’re going to have a hard time attracting competent, conscientious people to government service.
I’d like to know who thought it was a good idea to put all this personal information online, on a computer connected to the internet. I could see a limited database for employment verification or identity confirmation, but not much more than name, position, and supervisor’s contact information. I don’t see why anybody thought the life history of every government employee and contractor should be on the internet. The person who made that decision is the one Congress should be hounding.