Gen. Timothy Haugh, the head of both the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command, has been fired, the top Democrats on the House and Senate intelligence committees confirmed late Thursday night.
Haugh’s removal from the spy agencies was disclosed by Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, and Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, vice chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
CBS News has reached out to the Defense Department for comment.
Himes said in a statement he was “deeply disturbed” by the decision. News of the firing was first reported by the Washington Post. No further details were immediately available. It’s unclear who will be replacing him.
“I have known General Haugh to be an honest and forthright leader who followed the law and put national security first—I fear those are precisely the qualities that could lead to his firing in this Administration,” Himes said.
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Haugh had been in the role of NSA director for just over a year. He was first nominated to the post by former President Joe Biden back in May 2023, but his Senate confirmation was delayed until December 2023 because of Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s months-long hold on military nominations protesting a Pentagon policy on reimbursing travel expenses for service members who have to seek reproductive health care.
“At a time when the United States is facing unprecedented cyber threats, as the Salt Typhoon cyberattack from China has so clearly underscored, how does firing him make Americans any safer?” said Warner in a statement on Haugh’s firing, referencing last year’s China-linked hack of U.S. telecom companies.
Haugh last week testified on Capitol Hill about the Signal leak in which a journalist for the Atlantic had been added to a group chat with high-ranking members of the Trump administration, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, regarding an operation to bomb Houthi targets. Haugh was not on the chat.
The NSA director reports to the DNI.
Warner said it was “astonishing” that President Trump “would fire the nonpartisan, experienced leader of the National Security Agency while still failing to hold any member of his team accountable for leaking classified information on a commercial messaging app – even as he apparently takes staffing direction on national security from a discredited conspiracy theorist in the Oval Office,” a reference to billionaire Elon Musk, the head of the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency, who met with Haugh last month.
contributed to this report.
