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The Department of Homeland Security is preparing to shed hundreds of employees from its headquarters, with targets including artificial intelligence experts and the DHS customer experience directorate.
Multiple sources familiar with DHS’ plan said Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s goal is to cut the department’s Management Directorate by roughly 50%. They said DHS leadership has directed management offices to identify staff that they don’t consider “critical” or “essential” to the mission in line with the Trump administration’s governmentwide workforce cuts.
The Management Directorate serves as a central administrative support hub for all DHS components. The directorate oversees department-wide budgeting, IT, biometric systems and contracting, among other support areas. Its divisions include the chief financial officer, the chief information officer and the chief procurement officer.
Budget documents show the directorate employs about 3,900 full-time equivalent, or FTE, staff.
“The idea is to get lean, get back to a time when management and headquarters elements were small and leaner,” one person familiar with the plans said.
Another source said DHS will execute the cuts by first re-opening the “deferred resignation program” to management staff “imminently.” The source said DHS then plans to offer eligible employees a voluntary early retirement option. DHS may also offer voluntary separation incentive payments.
DHS will then initiate a reduction in force to further cut staff, the source said.
“We are determined to eliminate government waste that has been happening for decades at the expense of the American taxpayer,” a DHS official said in a statement shared by the department’s press office. “Across DHS, we will be eliminating non-mission critical positions and bureaucratic hurdles that undermine our mission to secure the homeland. Secretary Noem is determined to return DHS to its core mission of keeping America safe.”
Sources confirmed the cuts are specifically targeting two Biden-era initiatives: the DHS AI Corps and the department’s CX directorate.
DHS established the AI Corps last year amid a governmentwide push to recruit AI experts and ensure agencies use AI responsibly. Corps members serve in the DHS CIO’s office, but are farmed out across the department to work on AI use cases. A source said the AI Corps had risen to 47 employees earlier this year.
Meanwhile, DHS launched the CX directorate in 2023. Like the AI Corps, the directorate serves a central hub, in this case for human-centered design and other CX expertise. Its work has focused on streamlining and modernizing DHS’ public services, including immigration forms and disaster response paperwork. Officials have said DHS interacts with the public more than any other federal agency, with customer-facing components including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Transportation Security Agency, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
The CX directorate also includes the division that leads DHS’s accessibility and language services. Agencies are required by law to ensure their information and communications technology is accessible for people with disabilities.
Dana Chisnell, who recently stepped down as head of the CX directorate, said its staff includes about 40 federal employees and 30 contractors. She said the directorate’s budget is about $10 million a year.
Chisnell said the CX directorate’s work to eliminate 30 million paperwork “burden hours” over the last two years has saved the government roughly $2.1 billion.
“This group of people delivers amazing value,” Chisnell said. “Killing CX is obviously not about cost savings or efficiency.”
Multiple sources familiar with the planned cuts said both the AI Corps and the CX directorate have done good work, but are being tied to the Biden administration and specific executive orders that Trump has since repealed.
“That’s been part of the agenda — erase anything good that the Biden administration did,” one source said. “The second guideline seems to be, cut anything that’s not legally required.”
So far under Trump, DHS has not cut staff at the rate of other agencies. Many of its components were told their employees couldn’t take the initial “fork in the road” offer. In early February, DHS laid off just over 400 probationary employees — out of a total of 260,000 staff across the department — but most have since been reinstated under federal court orders.
More recently, however, DHS instituted reductions-in-force for multiple civil rights offices at its headquarters. Noem has also called for eliminating FEMA and downsizing components like the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
DHS also now has several more political appointees in place to oversee the management cuts, including recently confirmed Deputy Secretary Troy Edgar. President Donald Trump also recently nominated Karen Evans, a former federal CIO and more recently a senior executive at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, to serve as under secretary for management.
“The first time around, we did this with a scalpel — now, it’s a flamethrower for anything it isn’t ‘mission essential,’” a source said.
DHS is also reviewing contracts at the Management Directorate. One of the sources said approximately 1,400 contracts are being reviewed by DHS, the Department of Government Efficiency and the General Services Administration. DHS has also started posting some contract cancellations on its website.
“If you can’t tie yourself directly to a critical function that is essential to the mission, then they’re looking to eliminate it,” the source said.
(With additional reporting by Jason Miller)
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