Unfinished business for Trump: Ending the Cyber Command and NSA 'dual hat'

Advisers contributing to President-elect Donald Trump’s transition effort are readying a plan to split up the leadership of U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency, potentially soon after he assumes office, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Although the proposal is in its early stages, these people said, the recommendation has already been shared with the America First Policy Institute, a right-wing think tank that has crafted its own scheme for staffing and setting the policy agenda at each federal agency. 

If Trump does cleave the “dual-hat” arrangement — in which a single officer leads the cyberwarfare command and the electronic spy agency —  it would complete a push he began in 2020 with just a little more than a month left in office. While there are legal hurdles in place, Trump could overcome them without proposing legislation.

“I had heard a few rumors, just from folks that it had been an item of discussion” within the transition’s orbit, Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD), who is expected to helm the Senate Armed Services Committee’s cyber subcommittee next year, told Recorded Future News.

Trump would then nominate people to fill each of the roles. Today, Cyber Command must be led by a four-star military officer. The NSA director must have at least three stars.

“From what I’m understanding, it's the guys who used to like silos that are pushing it,” Rounds said. “Sometimes it's time to change those silos. I don't like silos, necessarily.”

Cyber Command and the NSA are both headquartered at Fort Meade, Maryland, and run by Gen. Timothy Haugh. 

The debate over formally separating the roles is not new. It has been discussed among defense and intelligence officials and lawmakers ever since Cyber Command was established in 2010 and repeatedly examined over the last three administrations. 

Most recently, President Joe Biden tasked former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Joseph F. Dunford Jr. to lead a small team to examine the existing structure. While the review was not empowered to render judgment on the arrangement, it pointed strongly in favor of retaining it. The report was submitted to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines at the end of 2022.

A split is considered controversial because some worry it could lead to the signals intelligence collected by the NSA — seen by many as the gold standard of U.S. intelligence gathering — to be politicized. Such fears have been magnified by the looming return of Trump, who has long viewed the intelligence community as the bedrock of the “deep state” and vowed to overhaul it when he returns to the Oval Office.

Neither America First nor the Trump transition responded to requests for comment.

The 2020 move

Breaking up the organizations is prohibited under a past defense policy bill. The measure stipulates the two cannot be split unless the Defense secretary and the Joint Chiefs chairman jointly certify that such a move won’t hinder the effectiveness of Cyber Command.

That didn’t stop a handful of political appointees at the Pentagon from trying to ram the change through in December 2020, weeks before the end of Trump's first term. The initiative — which enjoyed the support of Kash Patel, at the time the chief of staff to the acting Defense secretary and now Trump’s pick to lead the FBI — was submitted to former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley.

Milley, who served with Paul Nakasone, Haugh’s predecessor, effectively killed it.

The political climate could be different this time, as Trump has named fervent loyalist Pete Hesgeth to lead the Pentagon and is reportedly weighing firing current Joint Chiefs Chairman C.Q. Brown because he might not share the president-elect’s views on DOD diversity and inclusion programs.

What’s more, former military officials note, while the conditions to separate the dual-hat are enshrined into law, there are no formal guidelines in statute for the certification process.

“Trump could take out a piece of paper with the seal of the president on it, write ‘The dual-hat is over,’ slide it across his desk and have his leadership sign it. That could be it. That could be the certification,” a former Cyber Command official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said.

“People think of the dual-hat as being sacrosanct but it’s really not. It’s a precarious arrangement.”

Reshaping lines of authority

A breakup would also trigger a tsunami of practical and policy questions about the bureaucratic restructuring of the intelligence and cybersecurity agencies, which have been intertwined for over a decade.

For example, Cyber Command requires a four-star officer to lead it as it’s one of the Pentagon’s 11 combatant commands. The NSA, as a “combat support agency,” needs only a three-star chief. Eliminating the dual-hat essentially would allow the military’s organization responsible for carrying out offensive cyber operations against adversaries overseas to outrank the U.S. government’s top electronic spy agency.

“No one’s thought this through,” according to a former U.S. official, who speculated that any break up would be accompanied or closely followed by an implementation of up to a year.

The official noted that undoing the arrangement would be cheered in some corners of the clandestine community: Some insiders believe Cyber Command sucks resources from NSA and others are uncomfortable with a uniformed military officer helming the world’s largest spy agency. It would also appease those who believe the two jobs are too big for one person — a perennial argument against the existing structure.

Sources predicted that Haugh, who is nearly one year into what is traditionally a three-year term that can be extended, would remain in his post, even if it is diminished. However, they cautioned, Trump might dismiss him anyway simply for being a Biden appointee and look to name his own digital warfare chief alongside a new head of NSA.

Lawmakers want to hear more

For now, members of Congress expressed hesitance over any scheme to divide the roles between two people.

“I’d just have to hear why they think it’s necessary and how it would be better. Somebody would have to make that case to me because nobody’s made it to me so far,” House Armed Services Committee Chair Mike Rogers (R-AL) told Recorded Future News.

His Senate counterpart, Roger Wicker (R-MS), who will chair the Armed Services Committee next year, sounded a similar note.

“There’s a reason that they are as they are,” he said. If a proposal made its way to Congress “we’d need to listen to it.”

Several lawmakers noted it was ironic that the incoming administration — which has plans to have Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy establish a Department of Government Efficiency to abolish federal red tape — would create more bureaucracy by sundering Cyber Command and NSA.

“This always bubbles up and it's a bad idea. The Hot Pocket eating, long-haired hackers that are the very best in the world, you don't want them separated by an institutional wall,” said Rep. Jim Himes (CT), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.

“Look, I'm an open-minded guy. If somebody wants to articulate a good, principled argument on why it's a good idea, I'll listen to that argument,” he said. “These yahoos who want to move everybody out of D.C. and believe that the FBI is a Mafia organization, they start with precisely zero credibility. But I will be open to whatever arguments they want to make.”