Federal CIO Greg Barbaccia has tapped the Department of Education’s chief information officer as the government’s new No. 2 IT official. Thomas Flagg will take over as deputy federal CIO after spending more than 11 years at the Department of Labor and leading Education’s IT shop since October 2024. In an email sent Thursday to agency CIOs and shared with FedScoop, Barbaccia said there was “an overwhelming amount of interest” in the deputy role “from an exceptionally strong field of candidates.” Flagg stood out due to the “depth and seriousness of his experience across multiple technology leadership roles,” Barbaccia wrote, pointing to his time at the Department of Education and DOL. The hiring of Flagg gives the White House its first permanent deputy CIO since September 2025, when Drew Myklegard left the public sector to become Carahsoft’s executive director of government programs. Since then, the acting deputy federal CIO position has been held by Jay Teitelbaum, an Office of Management and Budget, U.S. Digital Service and Department of Homeland Security alum.

The Trump administration is redirecting a cybersecurity scholarship program that requires recipients to work in government service toward artificial intelligence, leaving some current program scholars dismayed and bewildered. In an email to participating school program coordinators obtained by CyberScoop, the Office of Personnel Management and National Science Foundation said the CyberCorps Scholarship For Service program would now be known as CyberAI SFS. The email reads: “The SFS students we enroll today will not be employable when they graduate in 2-3 years without significant AI background. Any SFS student in this new program must be proficient in using AI in cybersecurity or providing security and resilience for AI systems. Therefore, new students in the legacy CyberCorps program must learn to acquire AI expertise to augment their cybersecurity expertise.” It also explains that “new SFS scholars will not be accepted to the Legacy CyberCorps(C) program without a description on how they will develop competencies at the intersection of cybersecurity and AI.”

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