WASHINGTON – The Trump administration ousted the director of the National Security Agency Thursday night, according to top congressional Democrats who decried the firing as making the U.S. less safe from cyber intelligence espionage activities by China and other U.S. adversaries.
Gen. Timothy Haugh, who was chief of U.S. Cyber Command in addition to leading the NSA, was unavailable for comment. The White House and the NSA did not return requests seeking comment.
Haugh, a career Air Force leader, was deputy commander of U.S. Cyber Command at Fort George G. Meade, Md., until President Joe Biden tapped him to lead the NSA in Feb. 2024. He was one of the few holdovers from the Biden administration at a time when President Donald Trump has moved quickly to replace his intelligence agency leadership with political hires he believes will be loyal to him.
Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner of Virginia said in a statement that Haugh “has served our country in uniform, with honor and distinction, for more than 30 years.”
“At a time when the United States is facing unprecedented cyber threats, as the Salt Typhoon cyberattack from China has so clearly underscored, how does firing him make Americans any safer?” said Warner, a critic of what he says is Trump’s aggressive politicization of the intelligence community.
Warner also said it was “astonishing” that Trump would fire the “nonpartisan, experienced leader” of the NSA while failing to hold any member of his national security team accountable for the leaking classified information about war plans in Yemen on Signal, a commercial messaging app, last month.
Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said he was “deeply disturbed by the decision to remove General Haugh as Director of the National Security Agency.”
“I have known General Haugh to be an honest and forthright leader who followed the law and put national security first — I fear those are precisely the qualities that could lead to his firing in this Administration,” Himes said in a statement. “The Intelligence Committee and the American people need an immediate explanation for this decision, which makes all of us less safe.”
Haugh’s ouster was first reported by The Washington Post.
The Post also reported that Haugh’s civilian deputy at the NSA, Wendy Noble, was ousted and reassigned to an intelligence job within the Department of Defense. The NSA is one of several military intelligence agencies within the Pentagon.
The named acting NSA director is Lt. Gen. William J. Hartman, who was the Cyber Command deputy, and his No. 2 for now will be Sheila Thomas, who was the executive director at the NSA, the Post reported.
Tech billionaire Elon Musk, the Trump advisor and head of his cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency, visited the NSA’s headquarters outside of Washington last month, the Post reported.
A native of Hughesville, Pennsylvania, Haugh has been a commander at virtually every level of the Air Force from squadron on up, his NSA bio said. He also served as deputy commander of Joint Task Force Ares, the effort to counter terrorist groups like the Islamic State in cyberspace, the NSA said.
Although not a household name like the CIA or FBI, the NSA is a vast and extremely high-tech spying agency that specializes in gathering signals intelligence – more commonly known as electronic eavesdropping – around the world, in space and more recently in cyberspace.
Through the NSA and also Cyber Command, Haugh led an effort to both protect America from cyberwarfare from an increasingly broad array of adversaries, but also to launch offensive cyberattacks against those who would do harm to the U.S. as well.
