President Donald Trump’s second administration has not been lacking in scandal. Several of the largest incidents involve issues of national security, particularly an event involving high-ranking administration officials that has been dubbed “Signalgate.” But this is not the White House’s only controversy related to national security.
Signalgate
On March 24, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, revealed that he had been added to a group chat in the messaging app Signal about an upcoming U.S. strike against the Houthis in Yemen. Members of the chat included Vice President J.D. Vance, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and others.
Soon after Goldberg was added to the chat, bombs began falling in Yemen, confirming that the conversation was real. It is “not uncommon for national security officials to communicate on Signal,” said Goldberg in his initial article. But the app is “used primarily for meeting planning and other logistical matters — not for detailed and highly confidential discussions of a pending military action.” The discussion “concerned the timing and rationale of attacks on the Houthis” and eventually “veered toward the operational,” Goldberg said in a follow-up article.
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The White House defended the use of Signal for these classified conversations, and Waltz later claimed that Goldberg had been “sucked into” the group chat. “Nobody was texting war plans,” Hegseth later told reporters, an assertion that turned out to be false. But the event represented “what national security experts say is one of the most serious White House national security breaches in years, if not decades,” said USA Today. Both Republicans and Democrats expressed concern over the leak, and some vowed to get to the “bottom of whether the security breach violated laws like the Espionage Act, which prohibits gathering, transmitting or losing national defense.”
Use of Gmail
Following Signalgate, Waltz found himself in more hot water after a report in The Washington Post alleged that he used Gmail to conduct government business. Most damningly, a “senior Waltz aide used the commercial email service for highly technical conversations with colleagues at other government agencies.” This included emails concerning “sensitive military positions and powerful weapons systems relating to an ongoing conflict.” The aide reportedly used their personal Gmail account, while other agency colleagues used their government Gmail accounts.
Waltz himself has had “less sensitive, but potentially exploitable information sent to his Gmail, such as his schedule and other work documents,” according to the Post. Gmail counts millions of users and is much less secure than even Signal, so the incident “risks further damage to the standing of Waltz” and “places further scrutiny” upon U.S. intelligence agencies, said The Guardian. It marks the “latest example of questionable data security practices by top national security officials,” said the Post.
NSA firings
Trump has taken drastic steps to reduce the size of the federal government, and some of these moves have generated national security concerns — most notably, a series of firings at the National Security Agency (NSA). The most significant axings were of U.S. Cyber Command head and NSA Director Gen. Timothy Haugh and NSA Deputy Director Wendy Noble. Haugh was “ousted because Laura Loomer, a far-right wing conspiracy theorist and Trump adviser, had accused him and his deputy of disloyalty,” said The New York Times.
Haugh and Noble were two of “several national security officials fired” on Loomer’s advice, said the Times. Members of Trump’s National Security Council were also let go, and the “criterion Loomer appears to be using as she looks to oust people she sees as disloyal is their connections to critics of the Trump administration.” Congress members from both sides of the aisle expressed concern over the firings, though more of this anger came from Democrats. Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) “raised alarm about Laura Loomer’s influence in the Trump administration,” said The Hill.
The firings “severely compromise our ability to keep Americans safe” and it is “inexplicable that the administration would remove the senior leaders of NSA/CYBERCOM without cause or warning, and risk disrupting critical ongoing intelligence operations,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said in a statement. Some Russia and China are “laughing at us because we just fired the absolute best leaders,” said Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) to CBS News.
Defense cuts
Beyond slashing jobs, budget cuts could also slash into the country’s national security apparatus, experts say. Trump has overseen a “systematic degradation of its national security apparatus in just two months,” said Time, part of a $580 million cut in spending for the Department of Defense. This has led to “diminished cyber offensive and defensive operations” that “offer adversaries unnecessary relief and expose the U.S. to new threats. This is part of a weakening of government institutions that leaves American national security at risk, according to analysts.
When it comes to the fired Defense Department employees, it remains “unclear how many, if any, will be exempt due to national security considerations, and that it is still unclear how people will be contacted,” said NPR. The “list of priorities and possible cuts has troubled some on Capitol Hill who could see their own priorities come to an end.” The list of total budget cuts includes at least 80 CIA workers, and the White House is reviewing a list of 3,600 FBI employees, including those involved in the FBI’s Jan. 6 investigation and members of the FBI’s counterterrorism division, for potential dismissal,” said Time.
Database consolidation
Many details about the lives of the 330 million Americans are held in disconnected databases across the federal government — but that could change if Trump and DOGE head Elon Musk get their way. The White House is “now trying to connect the dots of that disparate information,” according to The New York Times. This includes sensitive data such as gross income, Social Security numbers, medical records, gambling debts, and “at least 263 more categories of data.”
Trump has signed an executive order calling for the “consolidation of unclassified agency records” throughout federal agencies as part of his plan to weed out fraud. But this raised the “prospect of creating a kind of data trove about Americans that the government has never had before, and that members of the president’s own party have historically opposed,” said the Times.
Musk and DOGE have reportedly attempted to access large swaths of Americans’ personal information in order to consolidate it, ignoring the “objections of career staff, data security protocols, national security experts and legal privacy protections,” said the Times. While the “unclassified agency records” do not contain classified data, they included “personally sensitive information on virtually everyone in America.” If Trump and Musk’s plan came to fruition, it could “create a national security vulnerability that could be targeted by hostile nation states.”
