Federal Leadership of the Year

The NSA has made the unprecedented move to telework in recent months — something the agency rarely did prior to COVID-19. CIO Greg Smithberger has led that effort, trying to work out what of the NSA’s sensitive workload could and couldn’t be done remotely. “It’s kind of become more of a standard for us to see how much we can actually do in a less protected environment to leverage our ability to work with some corporate partners who, in some cases, simply don’t have access to a SCIF but are fully cleared people,” he said earlier this year. “In other cases, we’re building a sort of a variation on this environment, where we’re going to be doing a lot more collaboration with people who don’t have clearances for the capabilities mission, for NSA’s cybersecurity mission, for our research.”