The Federal Government Needs a Technical Bankruptcy, Not Another Security Patch
The news that CISA has lost over a third of its workforce while federal cybersecurity s
The federal government needs to declare technical bankruptcy and start over. Not reform. Not modernization. Not "digital transformation." A complete architectural reboot that treats the current federal IT infrastructure as what it actually is: a collection of systems so compromised by age, complexity, and accumulated technical debt that securing them is mathematically impossible.
The Impossible Math of Legacy Security
When CISA's acting director admits to a "40 percent vacancy rate across key mission areas" while simultaneously claiming they're "accelerating innovation," we're witnessing the final stage of a security theater that has consumed billions of dollars over decades without meaningfully improving our defensive posture.
The federal government operates an estimated 6,000 different software systems across hundreds of agencies. Many run on code written before the internet existed, patched and re-patched until the original architecture is unrecognizable. These systems weren't designed for security because they weren't designed for the threats they now face. They were built in an era when "air gap" wasn't a security measure but a physical reality.
Consider the mathematics: each system has multiple dependencies, integration points, and attack surfaces. The complexity grows exponentially with each connection. A single federal agency might run mainframes from the 1980s talking to cloud services deployed last week, all managed by contractors who learned the systems from other contractors who learned them from people who have since retired.
This isn't a cybersecurity problem. It's an architecture problem masquerading as a cybersecurity problem.
What Silicon Valley Understood That Washington Doesn't
When successful technology companies encounter systems this broken, they don't try to secure them. They replace them.
Netflix didn't try to patch their way from a DVD-by-mail system to a global streaming platform. They built an entirely new architecture designed for the problem they needed to solve. Amazon didn't incrementally improve their original website; they rebuilt their entire infrastructure multiple times as they scaled.
The key insight from these companies isn't about technology, it's about acceptable risk. Private companies understand that maintaining broken systems is more expensive and more dangerous than replacing them. They can tolerate short-term disruption in exchange for long-term stability and security.
The federal government has the opposite incentive structure. Political leaders get punished for system outages during transitions but rarely held accountable for the accumulated security debt of maintaining broken systems. The result is a preference for patches over solutions, bandaids over surgery.
This dynamic creates what security professionals call "security theater": visible investments in cybersecurity that make stakeholders feel better without actually improving security posture. New monitoring tools, additional compliance frameworks, and expanded security teams all serve to document our failures more thoroughly without preventing them.
The CISA Collapse Proves the Point
The current staffing crisis at CISA isn't just about politics or budget cuts. It's about the impossibility of the mission as currently defined.
CISA is tasked with securing thousands of systems across hundreds of agencies, each with their own legacy infrastructure, contractor relationships, and technical debt. Even with full staffing, this mission requires security professionals to become expert in systems they didn't build, can't fully understand, and don't have authority to meaningfully change.
The agency's own admission that it's "hampered by an approximately 40 percent vacancy rate" while trying to "support national security imperatives" reveals the fundamental impossibility of the current approach. You cannot secure what you cannot understand, and you cannot understand systems this complex and fragmented.
Former comptroller general Gene Dodaro's warning that "we're taking our foot off the gas at CISA" misses the deeper problem: pressing the gas pedal harder doesn't help when you're driving off a cliff. The incremental progress he references wasn't real progress toward security; it was progress toward better documentation of our vulnerabilities.
The Clean Slate Alternative
What would technical bankruptcy look like for federal cybersecurity?
First, acknowledge sunk costs. The billions invested in securing legacy systems represent money spent, not money invested. These systems will never be secure because they cannot be secure. Every dollar spent patching them is a dollar not spent building their replacements.
Second, design for the threat environment that exists, not the one that existed when these systems were built. Modern federal systems should assume constant compromise, operate with zero trust architectures, and isolate failures automatically. This isn't possible with systems designed when network connections were expensive and rare.
Third, build replacement systems in parallel rather than trying to upgrade existing ones. This allows for proper testing, gradual migration, and the ability to abandon the project if it's not working. Most importantly, it avoids the death-by-a-thousand-patches approach that has defined federal IT modernization for decades.
The Department of Defense understood this when they created the Enterprise DevSecOps Reference Design. Instead of trying to secure their existing development processes, they built new ones designed for continuous deployment in contested environments. The results speak for themselves: faster deployment, better security, and lower operational costs.
The Counterargument: Continuity Matters
Critics of the clean slate approach raise legitimate concerns about operational continuity. Federal systems can't just go offline while replacements are built. Citizens depend on these services, and national security can't tolerate gaps in capability.
These concerns are real, but they miss the larger risk: the current approach guarantees failure. Every major federal data breach, from OPM to SolarWinds, has succeeded because attackers exploited the complexity and accumulated vulnerabilities of systems that had been patched and re-patched beyond recognition.
The continuity argument also ignores successful examples of federal agencies that have managed complete system replacements. The Patent and Trademark Office replaced their entire examination system. The FAA has successfully modernized air traffic control systems. These projects took years and cost billions, but they worked because leadership committed to replacement rather than incremental improvement.
Moreover, the current approach doesn't actually provide continuity. It provides the illusion of continuity while creating single points of failure that threaten to take down entire agencies when they're finally exploited. The question isn't whether we can afford to replace these systems; it's whether we can afford not to.
What This Means for Practitioners
For cybersecurity professionals working in or with the federal government, the implications are clear: stop optimizing for an architecture that cannot be secured.
This doesn't mean abandoning your current responsibilities. It means advocating for architectural solutions rather than accepting security band-aids. When asked to implement another monitoring tool or compliance framework, ask whether the same resources could be invested in replacement systems designed for security from the ground up.
For agency leadership, the path forward requires accepting that current cybersecurity investments are largely wasted money. The billions spent on securing legacy systems have not made those systems secure; they've made them more complex and harder to replace.
For Congress and oversight bodies, the focus should shift from measuring cybersecurity investments to measuring progress toward architectural replacement. The Government Accountability Office's "open recommendations" that Dodaro referenced are symptoms of an approach that cannot succeed, not evidence that agencies aren't trying hard enough.
The Stakes of Staying the Course
The current approach to federal cybersecurity isn't just ineffective; it's actively counterproductive. Every security tool added to legacy systems makes those systems more complex and harder to replace. Every compliance framework creates institutional resistance to architectural change. Every incremental improvement deepens our commitment to systems that cannot be secured.
Meanwhile, adversaries are building systems designed for the current threat environment. China's approach to government IT architecture assumes constant foreign interference. Russia's systems are designed for resilience under active attack. The United States is trying to secure systems designed when the biggest cybersecurity threat was someone walking away with a floppy disk.
The staffing crisis at CISA isn't a temporary setback in our cybersecurity efforts. It's a signal that the current approach has reached its limits. We cannot hire enough people to secure systems this broken. We cannot train people fast enough to understand systems this complex. We cannot patch systems faster than attackers can find new vulnerabilities.
Technical bankruptcy isn't failure. It's the recognition that sometimes the most responsible thing to do is stop throwing good money after bad and start building something that can actually work. The federal government needs cybersecurity leaders brave enough to admit that our current approach has failed and bold enough to start over.
The alternative is what we're seeing now: a slow-motion collapse disguised as modernization, with each "improvement" making the fundamental problem harder to solve.
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Tags: cybersecurity, federal-government, technical-debt, infrastructure, policy