Treasury’s acting CIO to depart

The Treasury Department’s acting chief information officer is on his way out, making Treasury’s technology shop the latest to see turnover in the early months of Trump 2.0. 

Jeff King, Treasury’s principal deputy CIO, has been serving as the department’s acting CIO since late March, when the department’s previous tech lead left the post. King is departing next week, according to a Treasury leader familiar with the matter. 

It’s not clear who will replace King, they said, but it’s expected that Treasury will put a political appointee in the role. In February, the Office of Personnel Management put out a memo recommending that agencies redesignate any CIO roles reserved for career employees so that political appointees could also fill them. 

The department did not respond to a request for comment. 

The shakeup leaves a sparse leadership bench in the department’s tech office, as the chief technology officer and chief information security officer are also on their way out, FedScoop reported yesterday. 

As King has served as the principal deputy CIO since 2022, both that role and the CIO role will be vacant. Nick Totten, the department’s deputy CIO, remains, as do some of the department’s associate CIOs. 

King had been particularly focused on improving the cybersecurity posture of the department through things like threat detection and response. He previously worked as a senior Treasury advisor for cybersecurity for six years and has also held cybersecurity roles at Deloitte and IBM.

King also previously did a stint as the acting IRS CIO in 2023.

More recently, the IRS also lost its CIO and other acting deputy CIOs, as Nextgov/FCW has reported. The tax agency fired around 50 senior IT executives in late March. The IRS has also been in the spotlight over a recent controversial decision to share tax data with ICE for immigration enforcement.