Talented, mission-driven professionals — some who left lucrative private-sector careers, others tracking lifelong roads of public service to serve — are now being pushed out of the very institutions they fought to improve. These weren’t side projects or token hires. They were seasoned professionals, some with decades of experience, brought in to modernize critical systems, close digital equity gaps, and help rebuild trust in institutions that have too often failed the people they serve. When we lay them off, it sends a clear message: Innovation is expendable. And people feel it.

This isn’t a story about loss. It’s about what it takes to say yes to service — and why the door into government needs to stay open, especially for those who’ve had to work twice as hard just to reach it.

A long road to “yes”

I came to this country as a Cambodian refugee. I didn’t grow up with a roadmap to public service. My family didn’t have connections in Washington, and we didn’t understand the unspoken codes of federal hiring. But we believed in this country — and I believed that government should be open to anyone willing to do the work. 

So I showed up. I waited months for onboarding. I filled out background checks that asked me to recall details from places I barely escaped. If you’re an immigrant or refugee, the clearance process isn’t just paperwork — it’s a trial of faith. You’re asked for documents you may never have had. You’re scrutinized for family ties to regions you fled. You’re questioned about timelines you barely survived. And all the while, you carry the quiet weight of knowing your origin story, not your ability, might be the reason you’re screened out.

And yet, we persist. 

Because we believed in the opportunity to serve. We know that this country doesn’t just need the most polished resumes. It needs lived experience, grit, and people who understand government — not just as insiders but as everyday users of its services. 

Because we believe that our experiences — our differences — are part of what makes this country stronger. We believe in the mission. And we’re willing to endure the gauntlet not for prestige or power, but for the chance to give back to the very system that gave us a second chance.

Because we believe this system doesn’t account for people like us — but it requires people like us. People with resilience, range, and a deep sense of mission.

And that’s why, even after all the waiting, the uncertainty, the second-guessing — I still said yes.

Not because it was easy. But because I believe the opportunity to serve — to shape the system from the inside — was too meaningful to walk away from. I knew that if I could make it through the door, I could help open it for others.

Why we still choose to serve

And I was fortunate because people believed in me. I had the opportunity to serve first at the Defense Digital Service (DDS), the Department of Defense’s “SWAT team of nerds,” where I worked on mission-critical programs like Project Rabbit in support of Operation Allies Refuge. Later, I returned to the department as the first-ever Customer Experience Officer and helped transform how our nation’s largest employer delivers digital services to those in uniform and those who support them.

The path wasn’t easy. But it was worth it.

What kept me going was the people: brilliant, mission-driven civil servants and digital leaders who believed that technology should serve the public, not the other way around. I was proud to stand beside them, bringing not just my experience from the tech world, but my lived experience as someone who knows what it means to build a life from nothing and still give back.

And now — even fewer seats at the table

As if the hiring process weren’t challenging enough, we’re now watching the table itself shrink.

Across government, layoffs, restructuring, and budget constraints are forcing talented, mission-driven professionals out of the very institutions they worked so hard to get into. Some of the most impactful programs, created precisely to bring in fresh perspectives and accelerate innovation, are being scaled back, defunded, or sunsetted altogether.

What’s worse is the ripple effect. Talented early-career professionals now see instability. Refugees and immigrants wonder if they were ever really welcome. Private-sector experts question whether the sacrifice is worth it.

This is more than just organizational reshuffling. It’s a loss of momentum and, for many, a loss of faith. We’re not just losing people; we’re losing trust, and that’s harder to rebuild.

The bar should be high — but the door should be open

I still believe in a high bar. These roles shape policy, security, and lives. They should demand excellence. But excellence and exclusivity aren’t the same.

Too often, our hiring systems reward familiarity over capability. They favor the polished, not the prepared. They assume that if you don’t speak the language of USAJobs or clearance investigations, you must not belong. That’s not merit — that’s legacy.

We can do better. We can build systems that uphold rigor and recognize resilience. That treats unconventional paths as assets, not risks. That makes space for the startup founder, the refugee, the self-taught technologist — the person who didn’t grow up imagining they’d work in government, but showed up anyway.

Final thoughts

Public service isn’t perfect. But it’s one of the few places where your work can outlive you.

I didn’t come from the system, but I was trusted to help improve it. I built things that mattered. I brought urgency where there was inertia. I advocated for the user when no one else was in the room. And I did it all with the perspective of someone who never expected to be let in and never took the opportunity for granted.

Keep the bar high. But keep the door open.

We can’t afford to lose them.

And we can’t afford to lose what they still have to offer.

This piece isn’t a eulogy. It’s a message to leadership: Don’t confuse short-term disruption with long-term disqualification. The people who were laid off aren’t gone — they’re watching. They’re weighing whether government will still make space for builders, reformers, and outsiders. If we let this moment pass without intention, we risk shrinking the very table we worked so hard to expand.

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The organization, which is part of the Chief Digital and AI Office (CDAO), is partnering with Bugcrowd, a crowdsourced security platform, on the vulnerability disclosure effort.

The so-called Continuous Bounty, which kicked off this week, is scheduled to last at least a full year with an option for extension.

“We are beginning with public-facing DDS assets (dds.mil and all associated subdomains, hackthepentagon.mil, and code.mil) and will scale to CDAO assets and beyond,” according to a Department of Defense release about the initiative. “This effort also includes a ‘rapid response’ capability, where our industry partner can put researchers on the hunt for a specific, exploitable critical vulnerability across the entirety of DoD public-facing infrastructure in less than 72 hours. This will strengthen our cyber resiliency if we run into the next widespread/critical vulnerability.”

The Pentagon began its Hack the Pentagon initiative during the Obama administration. The bug bounty launched this week will be less limited in time horizon and scope than previous ones, the release suggested.

“We hope to set an example in DoD that running continuous bounties strengthens our assets and sets a precedent that continuous checks on vulnerabilities is achievable and scalable to support obtaining quality data,” DDS Director Jennifer Hay said in a statement.

Bounty submissions will be opened to the public as the initiative progresses through testing, according to the release.

“The DDS and Hack the Pentagon teams are at the forefront of defending our nation, embracing ongoing dialogue with diverse and cutting-edge talent to safeguard our vital assets. We are thrilled to be partnering with CDAO and revolutionizing approaches to continuous bug bounties and researcher engagement,” Kent Wilson, Bugcrowd’s vice president for public sector sales, said in a statement.

Since 2016, DDS has overseen more than 40 bug bounties with participation from about 1,400 “ethical hackers” who have collectively flagged more than 2,100 vulnerabilities for remediation, according to a press release issued in March.

As an example, for last year’s Hack the U.S. event, the Department of Defense paid out $75,000 in bounties to researchers who discovered nearly 350 bugs inside its networks.

Earlier this year, DDS set up a new website for its Hack the Pentagon program to help scale these types of efforts and attract new cyber talent.

“While advanced tools and automation can be helpful, we believe humans remain essential in defending against cybersecurity breaches. As we shift from an information to an intelligence age, the winning blow will be dealt by humans supported by intelligent machines,” Jinyoung Englund — then acting director of DDS who’s currently serving as the CDAO’s chief strategy officer for algorithmic warfare — wrote in an online post. “This is why we intentionally invite hackers to break into our systems and assets. By incorporating bug bounties into our overall cybersecurity strategy, we’re updating the cybersecurity playbook to assume breach and think like an adversary.”

Lawmakers are also pushing the Defense Department to expand its bug bounty efforts. The fiscal 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, which was passed by Congress this week, included a mandate for the Pentagon to set up a similar program to mitigate risks posed by artificial intelligence.

Additionally, the Pentagon has been looking for contractors to set up AI “bias bounty” programs.

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“I would say that the way that we’re trying to overcome paralysis is by analysis of the risk — and by being an organization that is setting the culture to experiment,” Jinyoung Englund, CDAO’s chief strategy officer for algorithmic warfare, said at the Google Public Sector Forum hosted by Scoop News Group. 

Personnel from four legacy Defense Department components — the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), Defense Digital Service (DDS), Office of the Chief Data Officer, and the Advana program — were realigned to form the CDAO in late 2021. Englund previously held leadership roles across DDS, including as its acting director, before she was tapped to serve as the CDAO’s first-ever chief strategy officer for algorithmic warfare.

That office reached full operating capability in 2022, the same year that Lyft’s former head of machine learning Craig Martell departed from his post at the ride-sharing service to lead it.

“[Martell] served in industry — and he’s not afraid to take risks. Why? Because as a scientist, he knows that risk can be measured and managed. And so the way that we as an organization within DOD are trying to accelerate adoption is by spreading a culture of learning by doing,” Englund said at the conference.

Offering a few examples, she pointed to Task Force Lima, which Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks recently formed under the CDAO to expedite the U.S. military’s grasp and deployment of emerging generative AI capabilities. That field essentially involves large language models that generate software code and media content based on human prompts. 

“Task Force Lima is led by mostly active-duty military, whose sole focus is to take the user-centered design and a human-centric approach to identifying what are the ways that generative AI can best assist our service members and our military counterparts in terms of how we implement that new technology within our bureaucracy,” Englund said.

“Already we’ve collected over 200 use cases” associated with the effort, she added, noting that the unit recently released a request for information to gain feedback regarding novel ways in which generative AI could be hacked, and the ways in which products can be built to deliver services to free service members from rote work.

The CDAO’s unfolding Global Information Dominance Experiments (GIDE) mark another area where the office is “moving forward and spreading this culture of learning by doing,” she noted.

Englund explained that through this series of exercises — the fourth of which is currently being conducted — the CDAO partners with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to get nascent technologies in the hands of warfighters to see “how they actually work in theater”— and determine if associated policies or requirements need to be rewritten to enable their use. 

In her view, the CDAO is in a unique position where it has the capacity to prototype new technologies, as well as rulemaking and acquisition authorities. 

“Let’s just be frank: there’s risk everywhere. Whether you’re a private sector business or a government agency, there’s risk. And risk can be and should be measured and managed. And if you can figure out a framework for doing that, then it really should not be so scary adopting the technology,” Englund said.

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As CDAO’s director of DDS, Hay takes over the portfolio — a product of the CDAO absorbing the Pentagon’s Defense Digital Service organization in 2022 — from Jinyoung Englund, who had been acting in the role since this January, when former director Katie Savage left to be the secretary of information technology for Maryland.

DDS sits under CDAO’s Directorate for Digital Service.

Hay has served in a number of roles across the Defense Department since 2002, when she worked as a senior intelligence analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency. She went on to also serve in roles as a senior adviser to the deputy secretary of defense, deputy director for intel and security programs in the Office of Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, and director of defense policy and strategy for the National Security Council. Prior to rejoining DOD this year, she held senior leadership roles at DataRobot in the private sector.

Englund will stay with CDAO but move from her previous official role as chief of staff for the Directorate for Digital Service to be chief strategy officer for the greater organization’s Algorithmic Warfare Directorate.

Englund penned a blog post published Monday announcing the new director and recapping CDAO’s major takeaways from attending DEF CON in Las Vegas last week.

“Jennifer Hay will be taking the helm as the fifth Director of the Defense Digital Service (DDS) in the Directorate for Digital Services (CDAO-DS),” Englund wrote. “She brings to DDS nearly 20 years of experience in the Department, including being on the ground floor in the Office of the Secretary of Defense when DDS was founded. I am confident her recent experience in the private sector ensures DDS will continue to lead with industry best practices while her experience in navigating the Department will ensure we impart lasting institutional change.”

As for Englund’s new role, she wrote that she will “work with CDAO directorates, DoD at large, and the industry to develop and align a strategy for the successful implementation of CDAO’s data, analytics, and AI platform components to deliver quality data and responsible and secure AI capabilities for the warfighter.”

Editor’s Note, Aug. 16, 2023: This story has been updated to reflect that CDAO is still recruiting for a deputy chief digital and AI officer to oversee the organization’s Directorate for Digital Service.

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Jennifer Hay — who has previously served in leadership roles in the Pentagon and private sector — was recently tapped as DDS’ new principal deputy. 

That news comes about a month after Maryland Gov.-elect Wes Moore appointed Katie Savage to be the state’s next secretary of information technology. Savage had moved up the ranks within DDS over several years and was at the time serving as DDS director, as well as deputy CDAO — both of which she exited to serve in Moore’s administration.

While Hay is the new deputy for DDS within the CDAO, “Jinyoung Englund is still acting director and serving in the position Katie Savage had [previously] filled,” a CDAO spokesperson told DefenseScoop on Friday.

Hay previously served as DOD’s deputy director for intelligence and security (I&S) programs in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. She also held multiple leadership roles in the private sector at DataRobot, according to her LinkedIn profile.

On Friday, the CDAO spokesperson did not confirm when Hay’s is stepping into her new position.

Prior to her appointment as acting deputy CDAO, Englund served as DDS chief of staff and was a digital service expert for strategic operations and product, according to her LinkedIn profile.

Craig Martell, who came to the Pentagon after being head of machine learning at Lyft, remains the department’s chief digital and AI officer — a role he assumed last spring.

The first iteration of DDS — originally known as the Defense Digital Service — was formed in November 2015 by the late Defense Secretary Ash Carter, as a pilot program to drive technological transformation within the Department of Defense. In February 2022, DDS kept its acronym but was absorbed into the newly established CDAO as the Directorate for Digital Services. Savage joined DDS in 2019 and was eventually named permanent director around the time of that broad reorganization in 2022.

In its current iteration, DDS still encompasses software and data engineers, data scientists, product managers and user research designers working to quickly deliver digital capabilities and usable products. In her LinkedIn profile, Englund described the organization as “a SWAT team of nerds based at the Pentagon in the office of the Secretary of Defense tasked with solving the DoD’s most pressing problems leveraging the best in modern technology.”

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“It’s so interesting. I really thought that there would be an adverse effect on government hiring because of the economy and because of [more people working from home] — and that’s just been the opposite,” Savage said on Thursday at CyberScoop’s CyberTalks event in Washington.

DDS is essentially a “rapid response team” of expert engineers, data scientists, product managers and designers working within the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Following a recent reorganization of multiple offices, the team was moved under the purview of the nascent Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office in OSD.  

DDS officials typically serve two- to five-year terms within the department. But since the pandemic and associated shutdowns, some technologists are now actively interested in serving for longer, Savage noted.

“And increasingly, right here in interviews, people want to be more mission focused. They don’t want to build like a dog-walking app or something like that — they’re saying things like ‘I want a job that my children will be proud of,’” Savage said. “And they’re also interested in the stability that the government can provide.” 

Many people applying to DDS and the Pentagon in technology-focused roles now were laid off from industry jobs, she observed. 

“The workforce and the environment shifted during the pandemic. So, I think in government we have an incredible opportunity right now to take advantage of the flexibility and the stability that the government can provide and, you know, the mission that industry can’t always compete with,” Savage said.

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The payouts were part of the ongoing bug bounty initiative in which vetted hackers are invited to find and disclose network vulnerabilities to the DOD in exchange for payment. Allowing these so-called white hat hackers to alert the Pentagon to the vulnerabilities discovered allows the department to fix them before they’re found and exploited by adversaries.

“We have to make sure we stay two steps ahead of any malicious actor. By paying out monetary rewards to ethical hackers, we harden our defenses in a very impactful way. This crowd-sourced security approach is a key step to identifying and closing potential gaps in our attack surface,” said Katie Savage, deputy chief digital and artificial intelligence officer for the Defense Digital Service.

The most recent campaign, dubbed Hack the U.S., kicked off on July 4 in partnership with the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO), DOD Cyber Crime Center (DC3) and HackerOne. It involved 267 hackers, 139 of which were new to the DOD’s vulnerability disclosure program.

In total, the department paid $75,000 in bounties and $35,000 in bonuses with 648 reports submitted, 349 of which were actionable.

“We knew from years of a successful [vulnerability disclosure program] that professional hackers are a critical extension of our team. This bounty challenge shows the extra value we can earn by leveraging their subject matter expertise in an incentivized manner,” Melissa Vice, director of the disclosure program at DC3, said in a blog post shared with reporters prior to its scheduled publication on Thursday.

“Through initial evaluation of Hack U.S. reporting, the most commonly identified vulnerability is categorized as ‘Information Disclosure.’ With the identification of vulnerability trends, we can seek out patterns of detection and ultimately create new processes and system checks to ensure we address the root cause and develop further mitigations against malicious actors who might try to exploit our systems,” she said.

This particular iteration of the program was focused on identifying critical vulnerabilities while previous efforts were invite-only and focused on a specific group of assets hacked for a limited time, according to a DOD spokesperson. This effort covered a broader scope of assets under the DOD’s vulnerability disclosure program. It was also publicly open to hackers on the HackerOne platform, the spokesperson added, noting this is atypical for DOD’s reward-driven bug bounty initiatives.

Savage noted that by running these types of programs over the past six years, the partnership between ethical hackers and the government has yielded thousands of security insights.

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The initiative — known as Hack U.S. — is enabling the DOD to experiment with paid public incentives in its vulnerability disclosure program (VDP) to see if such approaches could result in more high-fidelity findings with greater impact.

HackerOne launched the department’s very first bug bounty program, Hack the Pentagon, with the Defense Digital Service (DDS) in 2016. DDS is now part of the newly structured Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO), which is overseeing the latest bug bounty pursuit with DOD’s Cyber Crime Center (DC3). 

With Hack U.S., “for the first time, we’re paying for submitting vulnerabilities against the entire DoD scope of assets numbering in the tens or hundreds of thousands,” CDAO spokesperson Kathleen Clark told FedScoop on Friday.

“At the end of the fourth day, we have paid out 90 unique high and critical vulnerabilities with an additional 78 reports left to be triaged,” she said, noting that the “impact of the vulnerabilities ranged from a serious headache” to an Office of Personnel Management-level protected health information (PHI) and personally identifiable information (PII) risk.

By that point, 111 unique vulnerabilities that were not severe enough for a payout were also pinpointed. Those will be addressed under the traditional disclosure program.

“In an effort to attract top talent to help improve the DOD’s cybersecurity posture, we are proud to partner with DC3 and HackerOne to pilot a program to offer researchers financial incentives through the VDP for the first time. This effort has proven to be a step in the right direction given the robust response and the disclosure of critical vulnerabilities,” Katie Olson Savage, deputy chief digital and artificial intelligence officer and DDS director, told FedScoop.

The program is ultimately intended to drive security researchers to properly conduct vulnerability discovery activities spanning publicly accessible Defense Department information systems — and help the department determine how feasible it would be to award such bounties on a continuous basis.

“Only critical and high vulnerabilities that could severely limit the confidentiality, availability, or integrity of a system were eligible for bounty, driving researchers towards big-game bug hunting,” Clark noted.

She said researchers are “participating globally with only minimal restrictions placed on payouts,” and “were explicitly given the .GOV and .EDU scopes that DOD operates for the first time.”

More than 130 unique researchers have submitted findings so far, Clark added, and the program has had multiple “temporary pauses” to keep up with all the reports rolling in. 

“The vulnerabilities discovered by the hacker community during Hack U.S. will offer more air cover on all the assets that help maintain U.S. national security, and insights from reports will help inform how the DOD approaches identifying future threats,” HackerOne co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Alex Rice told FedScoop.

A hostile actor operating against the U.S. could potentially look to exploit these exact vulnerabilities to force cybersecurity forces into a “blue team” defensive posture. 

“Every one of these vulnerabilities [discovered during Hack U.S.] is one less incident the DOD would have to address,” Clark noted.

So far, early evidence suggests that — even at a low bounty payout — this model yields benefits for the Pentagon.

“Funding a paid vulnerability disclosure process is the next evolution of the VDP and will make our nation more secure,” Clark said.

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This news comes nearly six months after the Department of Defense launched a major organizational restructure to place a number of technology-driving components under this newly established office, with the ultimate aim to better scale digital and Al-enabled capabilities across its massive enterprise.

“Following a multi-step process from [initial operating capability] to FOC the CDAO has fully merged and integrated the former component organizations of Advana, Chief Data Officer, Defense Digital Service, and Joint Artificial Intelligence Center. Legacy component names will no longer be recognized or used unless attributed to a product or capability specific to the department,” according to a statement from CDAO’s spokesperson.

New hires include: 

• Chief Digital and AI Officer – Craig Martell
• Deputy CDAO – Margaret Palmieri
• DCDAO for Acquisition – Sharothi Pikar
• DCDAO for Policy, Strategy and Governance – Clark Cully
• DCDAO for Enterprise Platforms and Business Optimization – Greg Little
• DCDAO for Algorithmic Warfare – Joe Larson
• DCDAO for Digital Services – Katie (Olson) Savage
• Chief Operating Officer – Dan Folliard
• Chief Technology Officer – Bill Streilein
• Chief of AI Assurance – Jane Pinelis

Diane Staheli was also recently tapped to lead the CDAO’s Responsible AI (RAI) Division.

Several of these officials have already made waves within DOD, including founder and former director of the Navy’s digital warfare office Margaret Palmieri, and Joe Larson, who previously served as deputy chief for the Pentagon’s Project Maven.

In these new roles at the CDAO, the officials will help steer the Pentagon’s strategy development and policy formulation for associated solutions; enable data access and AI adoption within appropriate institutional processes; establish a strong digital infrastructure and services to support military and department components’ AI- and digital-driven deployments, and more.

The CDAO is targeting October 1 for the full administrative alignment of personnel and resources, the spokesperson told FedScoop.

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