The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee said he’s concerned that Chinese espionage units may be mulling ways to exploit new hacking opportunities against the government as the Department of Government Efficiency works to dismantle core segments of the federal enterprise.
Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., said Wednesday that Beijing may be watching closely as federal workers become distracted by the Elon Musk-led DOGE entity which has gained access to several agencies’ sensitive systems and is accelerating the termination of thousands of federal employees.
Referring to Volt Typhoon, a pervasive Chinese cyberespionage group that’s been burrowing into various types of critical infrastructure across the nation for years, he said China’s hacking activity is “as severe as we have ever seen it.”
“People are people, and I wouldn’t blame anybody in this field, inside the federal government, for being distracted, for all the reasons I outlined,” he said. “But what are the Chinese thinking about where there may be gaps? Where there may be inattention? What can they do? What is Volt Typhoon 2.0 and how can they exploit this moment in time?”
Himes, who was speaking at a George Mason University National Security Institute event on Capitol Hill, said he was very worried about the Trump administration’s treatment of federal workers in national security roles. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and multiple intelligence community offices have been targeted for workforce reductions as DOGE seeks to purge purported government spending waste.
“What’s the point?” he said. “So I worry very, very much about brain drain.” Himes also referenced a recent White House executive order that targeted former CISA chief Chris Krebs, as well as President Donald Trump’s firing of NSA director Gen. Timothy Haugh, which he said happened for “puzzling reasons.”
Earlier this month, the National Counterintelligence and Security Center said Chinese intelligence units are using online techniques to recruit unwitting current and former federal employees.
Himes said that he hopes changes in the government calm down soon.
“I think it will. But those people are essential,” he said, referring to government workers. “And I hope that the administration will say, ‘Okay, we’re done with whatever efforts that we had with respect to whatever the mission of DOGE became … [and] that it will become very clear to our people that moment is over.”
He also advocated for the reauthorization of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, a foundational law passed a decade ago that allows the private sector to share threat intelligence data with the government, and provides industry vast legal protections to do so. It is set to expire in September.
An updated version of the law may have to address more modern cyber threats and would likely draw on lessons learned from hacking incidents in recent years. “We need to set up a safe space where information can travel back and forth better than it does,” Himes said.
The lawmaker also said the U.S. needs to develop a better offensive hacking strategy against cyber adversaries, a view shared widely by Republicans and several national security-focused Democrats.
“You know, it’s not that hard to imagine what something proportional to a Salt Typhoon would look like,” he said in reference to a Chinese hacking campaign that, last year, was discovered inside the core systems of major telecom providers. “Or it’s not that hard to imagine identifying the servers and the people who undertook those exploits and finding some way, in a proportional way, to send a very clear signal that we see what’s happening and that we’re not going to tolerate it.”
