Written by Richard Forno, principal lecturer in computer science and electrical engineering, UMBC

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), President Donald Trump’s special commission tasked with slashing federal spending, continues to disrupt Washington and the federal bureaucracy. According to published reports, its teams are dropping into federal agencies with a practically unlimited mandate to reform the federal government in accordance with recent executive orders.

As a 30-year cybersecurity veteran, I find the activities of DOGE thus far concerning. Its broad mandate across government, seemingly nonexistent oversight, and the apparent lack of operational competence of its employees have demonstrated that DOGE could create conditions that are ideal for cybersecurity or data privacy incidents that affect the entire nation.

Traditionally, the purpose of cybersecurity is to ensure the confidentiality and integrity of information and information systems while helping keep those systems available to those who need them. But in DOGE’s first few weeks of existence, reports indicate that its staff appears to be ignoring those principles and potentially making the federal government more vulnerable to cyber incidents.

Technical competence

Cybersecurity and information technology, like any other business function, depend on employees trained specifically for their jobs. Just as you wouldn’t let someone only qualified in first aid to perform open heart surgery, technology professionals require a baseline set of credentialed education, training and experience to ensure that the most qualified people are on the job.

Currently, the general public, federal agencies and Congress have little idea who is tinkering with the government’s critical systems. DOGE’s hiring process, including how it screens applicants for technical, operational or cybersecurity competency, as well as experience in government, is opaque. And journalists investigating the backgrounds of DOGE employees have been intimidated by the acting U.S. attorney in Washington.

DOGE has hired young people fresh out of – or still in – college or with little or no experience in government, but who reportedly have strong technical prowess. But some have questionable backgrounds for such sensitive work. And one leading DOGE staffer working at the Treasury Department has since resigned over a series of racist social media posts.

According to reports, these DOGE staffers have been granted administrator-level technical access to a variety of federal systems. These include systems that process all federal payments, including Social Security, Medicare and the congressionally appropriated funds that run the government and its contracting operations.

DOGE operatives are quickly developing and deploying major software changes to very complex old systems and databases, according to reports. But given the speed of change, it’s likely that there is little formal planning or quality control involved to ensure such changes don’t break the system. Such actions run contrary to cybersecurity principles and best practices for technology management.

As a result, there’s probably no way of knowing if these changes make it easier for malware to be introduced into government systems, if sensitive data can be accessed without authorization, or if DOGE’s work is making government systems otherwise more unstable and more vulnerable.

If you don’t know what you’re doing in IT, really bad things can happen. A notable example is the failed launch of the healthcare.gov website in 2013. In the case of the Treasury Department’s systems, that’s fairly important to remember as the nation careens toward another debt-ceiling crisis and citizens look for their Social Security payments.

On Feb. 6, 2025, a federal judge ordered that DOGE staff be restricted to read-only access to the Treasury Department’s payment systems, but the legal proceedings challenging the legality of their access to government IT systems are ongoing.

DOGE email servers

DOGE’s apparent lack of cybersecurity competence is reflected in some of its first actions. DOGE installed its own email servers across the federal government to facilitate direct communication with rank-and-file employees outside official channels, disregarding time-tested best practices for cybersecurity and IT administration. A lawsuit by federal employees alleges that these systems did not undergo a security review as required by current federal cybersecurity standards.

There is an established process in the federal government to configure and deploy new systems to ensure they are stable, secure and unlikely to create cybersecurity problems. But DOGE ignored those practices, with predictable results.

For example, a journalist was able to send invitations to his newsletter to over 13,000 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration employees through one of these servers. In another case, the way in which employee responses to DOGE’s Fork in the Road buyout offer to federal employees are collected could easily be manipulated by someone with malicious intent – a simple social engineering attack could wrongly end a worker’s employment. And DOGE staff members reportedly are connecting their own untrusted devices to government networks, which potentially introduces new ways for cyberattackers to penetrate sensitive systems.

However, DOGE appears to be embracing creative cybersecurity practices in shielding itself. It’s reorganizing its internal communications in order to dodge Freedom of Information Act requests into its work, and it’s using cybersecurity techniques for tracking insider threats to prevent and investigate leaks of its activities.

Lacking management controls

But it’s not just technical security that DOGE is ignoring. On Feb. 2, two security officials for the U.S. Agency for International Development resisted granting a DOGE team access to sensitive financial and personnel systems until their identities and clearances were verified, in accordance with federal requirements. Instead, the officials were threatened with arrest and placed on administrative leave, and DOGE’s team gained access.

The Trump administration also has reclassified federal chief information officers, normally senior career employees with years of specialized knowledge, to be general employees subject to dismissal for political reasons. So there may well be a brain drain of IT talent in the federal government, or a constant turnover of both senior IT leadership and other technical experts. This change will almost certainly have ramifications for cybersecurity.

DOGE operatives now have direct access to the Office of Personnel Management’s database of millions of federal employees, including those with security clearances holding sensitive positions. Without oversight, this access opens up the possibilities of privacy violations, tampering with employment records, intimidation or political retribution.

Support from all levels of management is crucial to provide accountability for cybersecurity and technology management. This is especially important in the public sector, where oversight and accountability is a critical function of good democratic governance and national security. After all, if people don’t know what you’re doing, they don’t know what you’re doing wrong.

At the moment, DOGE appears to be operating with very little oversight by anyone in position willing or able to hold it responsible for its actions.

Mitigating the damage

Career federal employees trying to follow legal or cybersecurity practices for federal systems and data are now placed in a difficult position. They either capitulate to DOGE staffers’ instructions, thereby abandoning best practices and ignoring federal standards, or resist them and run the risk of being fired or disciplined.

The federal government’s vast collections of data touch every citizen and company. While government systems may not be as trustworthy as they once were, people can still take steps to protect themselves from adverse consequences of DOGE’s activities. Two good starting points are to lock your credit bureau records in case your government data is disclosed and using different logins and passwords on federal websites to conduct business.

It’s crucial for the administration, Congress and the public to recognize the cybersecurity dangers that DOGE’s activities pose and take meaningful steps to bring the organization under reasonable control and oversight.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article and see more than 250 UMBC articles available in The Conversation.

Some mathematical and statistical challenges are so fundamental that the solutions can be applied to an array of real-world applications—which we all benefit from. But it’s not necessarily the applications that excite researchers. They’re on the hunt to develop an elegant set of equations or a more accurate model because of the work’s inherent beauty and satisfaction, and, simply, because it’s fun.

This past fall, members of the UMBC Department of Mathematics and Statistics received at least three major grants to pursue work with significant real-world potential, from self-driving cars to treatments for Alzheimer’s. And while the mathematical work underpinning these potential uses can seem opaque, abstract, and just plain hard to many people, these mathematicians and statisticians see the process of thinking about the challenges as exciting and stimulating in and of themselves.   

Optimizing optimization

Andrei Draganescu, associate professor of mathematics, has received a grant from the National Science Foundation to pursue a creative new approach for solving optimization problems. Anytime a system performs a basic functionality, but you would like to make it better or more efficient, that’s an optimization problem, Draganescu explains. 

Optimization means maximizing or minimizing something, such as cost, time, or power output. Think about today’s large language models, such as ChatGPT: Before it can respond effectively to any prompts, the model must rely on an algorithm to “learn” an optimal set of parameters from a vast amount of training data. Only once those parameters are fixed can it use them as a basis to determine the best response to your prompt. The time, electricity, and human work hours involved in training can cost billions of dollars, not including the capital investment in the hardware itself—so even a very small increase in efficiency makes a huge difference.  

All of the possible combinations of parameters can be represented as points along a curved surface with hills and valleys. An algorithm developed by a mathematician can search for the lowest or highest point on that surface to solve the optimization problem, depending if you are looking for a minimum or a maximum. One risk with these algorithms is that they may end up at a local minimum or maximum—the peak of a single hill or the base of a single valley—that isn’t actually the global maximum or minimum across the entire surface.

In his grant application, Draganescu proposed a novel way of solving this kind of problem. “Because this type of problem is so old, it’s hard to find something new. But I think I did,” Draganescu says. Rather than searching for the minimum or maximum along a series of straight lines that approximate its curved surface, Draganescu has proposed a way to search directly along a set of well defined curves. The idea for the new approach “is a completely new angle,” he says, and in correspondence with colleagues to date, “nobody has contradicted me so far.”

Sticking with the hard problems

In math, there are many problems that are easy to express but extremely difficult to solve. Some have puzzled mathematicians for centuries. Draganescu’s Ph.D. advisor encouraged his students to think about these problems from time to time, in case they found a solution, of course, but also to keep their creative juices flowing. Draganescu continues the practice today.

“Sometimes I’ve spent days in a row on some of these very hard problems that nobody knows how to solve,” he says. “And of course I would love the glory, but honestly, that’s not where the fun is. I’m old enough to know that the fun is actually thinking about it.”

“And of course I would love the glory, but honestly, that’s not where the fun is. I’m old enough to know that the fun is actually thinking about it.”

Andrei Draganescu

Draganescu’s sticktoitiveness sometimes pays off in his everyday work. In the case of the idea that underpins his recent proposal, “I was surprised that it actually worked out. But ‘working out’ means many many months of work,” he says. “From having the initial idea to trusting that it could go somewhere, there were a lot of mistakes in the calculations and all that.” So why did he persist, knowing there was a good chance it wouldn’t “work out”? “I stuck with it because it was fun. I enjoy thinking about these problems.” 

Draganescu is continuing to develop his new technique for solving optimization problems, which could improve efforts to optimize all kinds of systems, from AI to airline schedules to agriculture—all because he found joy from sitting with a sticky problem.

Replicating the real world

Ansu Chatterjee, professor of statistics, is another UMBC math mind whose work could have a major impact on a wide range of fields. He and UMBC colleagues Animikh Biswas, professor of mathematics, and Karuna Joshi, professor of information systems, have received an NSF grant to expand the use of “digital twin” technology. The grant proposal highlighted the potential to advance diagnosis and treatment for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, but digital twin technology has a huge range of potential applications.

A digital twin is “essentially a clone of something in the physical world replicated inside a computer,” Chatterjee says. Additional applications could include forest management or weather forecasting. These twins can offer up predictions about which direction a hurricane will turn, which treatment protocol might be most effective for a particular patient, or whether it’s the right time for a prescribed burn in a forest—but there will always be uncertainties in the models. 

“Measuring those uncertainties is a huge task,” Chatterjee says. How to deal with those uncertainties is one of the things the team wants to focus on with the new grant, which is very statistics-heavy, Chatterjee notes. Understanding and reducing the uncertainties requires understanding the physical processes at play in the real-world version of the system, and then working them into the model—and that’s hard. 

Beyond the black box

Typical AI models are frequently “black box models,” which means even the people who created them don’t always understand exactly what they’re doing. For one thing, they are not constrained by objective truth in the physical world, Chatterjee explains. “It’s not even attempting to get the biology or the chemistry correct,” he says, and that’s not acceptable for a digital twin that’s modeling the human brain and may be used to determine a real human’s treatment plan. 

“You don’t get the model right unless you get the underlying math of the molecules that constitute it right. So mathematics and statistics have to be the underpinning of anything related to digital twins.”

Ansu Chatterjee

“You don’t get the model right unless you get the underlying math of the molecules that constitute it right,” Chatterjee says. “So mathematics and statistics have to be the underpinning of anything related to digital twins.”

The digital twins Chatterjee and colleagues hope to further with their new research need not only replicate the outcomes of a system, but also the system’s mechanisms and internal processes. Again, that’s hard—especially when humans don’t yet fully understand many of these systems, such as the human brain, how cancer develops, or how various environmental factors influence carbon sequestration, for example.

“We are at the foundation of digital twins,” Chaterjee says. Once they are developed to a point where they are usable, digital twins and AI more generally would “open up a vast amount of opportunities for making fairly rapid progress with the actual science. This is where AI can help in scientific progress. It can suggest opportunities and possibilities which then can be verified,” Chatterjee says. “It would rule out certain possibilities. There would of course be false positives and false negatives, but as digital twins keep improving, it would be more and more convenient to use those first to find out a lot more interesting things.”

Fundamental building blocks

Chatterjee and colleagues are aware of the risks associated with digital twins. “There’s quite a lot of ethical issues that are related to digital twins in general, and it goes up several notches when it’s digital twins related to humans.” For example, there are regulatory concerns around who owns the data put into a digital twin (such as someone’s genomic data) and who is compensated when the twin is used for profit. “It’s exciting, and it’s also kind of a nightmare,” Chatterjee says. 

That’s why he and colleagues will be working directly with federal regulatory agencies to make recommendations about how to handle these AI models. “This grant is sort of laying down the first fundamental steps—saying this is what should be done, this is how the first steps should be done,” Chatterjee says. 

While that work is critical, it’s the math that truly excites Chatterjee. “For me, it’s about building the fundamental building blocks, whether it’s cancer or neurodegenerative diseases or forests” he says. “The essential ingredients for the digital component of it rely on the same math, the same statistics.”

Defining possible

Matthew Kvalheim, assistant professor of mathematics, is also working on developing tools that can help people in a wide range of situations. His ultimate goal? To be able to tell researchers whether whatever they are trying to do with their system is possible or impossible. Sound vague? That’s the point. 

“I’m never thinking about a specific application,” Kvalheim says. “I’m always working at the fundamental level, with a class of mathematical models that can describe all of them.” For Kvalheim, it’s the underlying math that is exciting—which is fortunate for all the people working on applications who will eventually use his multi-purpose tools. 

“For any real world system, you might want it to do some behavior, or not do some behavior,” Kvalheim says. This might be making sure two self-driving cars don’t collide, preventing a humanoid robot from falling on its face, or keeping an electronic device at a safe temperature. 

“Lots of people work on the set of models that I study,” he says, and the vast majority of them are investigating a particular application. These other researchers are very good at coming up with solutions that result in stability, or maintaining a certain state in a system, and safety, or preventing dangerous states in the system, “but there’s one thing they can’t do,” Kvalheim says. “They can’t determine if the thing they are trying to do, to make their system stable and safe in the way they want, is just fundamentally impossible. There could be a fundamental law of nature that says too bad, you can’t do it. You could try forever, but the heat death of the universe will occur first.”

A license to look

Kvalheim would like to discover new fundamental limitations that hold true for any application you could come up with, and also new fundamental capabilities. The U.S. Air Force recently awarded him a grant to further this work. He’s trying to generate a sort of mathematical litmus test that any practitioner can use to find out whether the thing they are trying to do with their system (whatever it is!) is fundamentally possible or impossible. If it’s impossible, it saves them a lot of time, energy, and money. And if it’s possible? “It’s like giving people a license to go look for it,” Kvalheim says.

The best part is that the end user of one of Kvalheim’s tools wouldn’t need to understand all the pure math behind it. “The idea is to produce useful tools that they can use even if they don’t have the time or interest in diving into all the details,” he says.

Math undergirds just about everything, Kvalhiem says, so it’s important to study the general case, rather than focus on specific applications. He wants people to see that it’s important “to know when there are fundamental laws of nature telling them that it is impossible or possible to do things that they want, and that math allows you to discover such laws of nature—and not just for one real-world system, but for many systems all at once.”

Somewhere a math or stat researcher is helping prevent your car from crashing, providing life-saving medical tools for yourself or a loved one, reducing wildfire risk where you live, or improving your experience with an AI tutor—and you might never even know it. There are humans behind each of these innovations who find joy and value in the math puzzles and problems that are all around us. And some of them work at UMBC. 

On January 31, the CASH Campaign of Maryland, a nonprofit working to promote the economic advancement of low-to-moderate income individuals and families in Baltimore and across Maryland, kicked off the 2025 tax season with a press conference at UMBC promoting free tax prep services in the Baltimore area, including services offered on the UMBC campus. 

Maryland Governor Wes Moore, Maryland Comptroller Brooke Lierman, U.S. Congressman Kweisi Mfume, and new U.S. Congressman Johnny Olszewski, Ph.D. ’17, public policy, spoke at the event, applauding the reach of the CASH Campaign and the UMBC student volunteers who make time to help their fellow Marylanders.

UMBC student Riaz Chaudry, a senior in financial economics, who has volunteered at the UMBC free tax prep site since his first year and now serves as the student president and site coordinator, also spoke about his experience. 

Chaudry says that when he arrived on campus, he explored many student clubs and other ways to get involved. Volunteering to help prepare taxes for low-to-moderate income Marylanders was the activity that most inspired him, because he felt the immediate impact of giving back to the community.

“It’s rewarding knowing that I am making a difference in people’s lives,” he says. 

Tax prep comes to UMBC

UMBC’s role as a free tax prep site started close to a decade ago, when Trisha Wells, theassistant vice provost for administration and finance for the Division of Professional Studies, says she and a few other UMBC community members who had volunteered as tax preparers at other sites came together to apply to open a UMBC site. The CASH Campaign supported the group with the application process, while UMBC partners such as Residential Life, the Division of Information Technology, the Career Center, and the Shriver Center worked to get space, computers, and more volunteers. The partnership continues with the CASH Campaign, which trains UMBC’s volunteers every year to be ready to prepare tax returns.

In the first year, the UMBC site prepared 115 tax returns, and now averages around 400 per year. Hundreds of trained student volunteers have participated in the efforts, which have saved clients hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

This year, any individual or family in Maryland with a household income of $67,000 or less qualifies for the free tax prep services. Wells says a wide diversity of people have come to the UMBC site over the years, including retirees and people self-employed with jobs such as drivers and home health aides. The services not only save clients tax preparation fees—they often educate people about tax credits they didn’t know they qualified for.

Helping Marylanders save their earned money

The press conference was held on “National Earned Income Tax Credit Awareness Day,” to raise the visibility of a tax credit designed to help low-to-moderate income individuals and families save money on their taxes.

Chaudry says he remembers helping a client last year file a 2023 return, and also amend her 2022 and 2021 returns. Thanks to the earned income credit, Chaudry says the client received a refund, which she was planning to use on unpaid bills. “Delivering the news to her, I could see that she was immediately relieved,” he says. “This is one of the most rewarding feelings as a volunteer.”

Wells agrees that helping clients get better tax refunds is a great part of the job. She also loves how the effort brings together UMBC staff, community, and students, and how the student volunteers learn and grow throughout the tax season.

“Many of our students have graduated, but still come back to volunteer when they can. It is that rewarding!” she says.

Meet Emmanuella Osei, a junior studying public health and sociology and the president of UMBC’s Public Health Council of Majors. She is passionate about health equity, public service, and mentorship. As a Retriever, Emmanuella is a fearless leader, actively involved in multiple scholar programs, and volunteer initiatives across the globe—from Maryland to South Africa to Costa Rica. Her commitment to high-impact research has led her to tackle critical issues like food insecurity among students at UMBC and access to long-term COVID-19 care. She is a proud recipient of the prestigious Jack Kent Cooke Scholarship. Her dedication to making a difference continues to take her where she is most needed. Take it away, Emmanuella!

Q: Briefly introduce yourself. What’s one essential thing you’d want another Retriever to know about you?

A:  I am pursuing a dual degree in public health and sociology and a certificate in the social dimensions of health. Throughout my time at UMBC, I have engaged in many experiential learning opportunities. In the summer following my freshman year, I interned at Columbia Community Care, a non-profit in Howard County that offers hunger relief, youth development, and wellness programs. In summer of 2024, I participated in the Summer Research Opportunity Program at the University of Michigan, where I researched access to long COVID care in the HELPER lab at the School of Public Health. Most recently, I participated in the AIFS study abroad program in Costa Rica where I learned about Costa Rica’s health care and tropical systems.

Q: Tell us about your primary WHY, and how it led you to UMBC.

A: I came to UMBC because of the vibrant and supportive community I felt when I first toured the campus. I knew that as an immigrant and first-generation student from Ghana [in West Africa], UMBC would be a great place to be. Because UMBC is a minority-serving institution and home to students from diverse backgrounds and identities, I felt it would offer the perfect environment for me to also grow academically while providing countless opportunities. So far, UMBC has definitely lived up to my expectations, and I truly believe that everyone can find their place here.

Q: Tell us about the people who are helping you grow at UMBC, and why their HOW made such a difference to you.

A: My research mentor, Dr. Sameera Nayak, has been extremely supportive of my independent research. She became my mentor during my sophomore year as part of the McNair Scholars Program. Now, as an Undergraduate Research Award Scholar studying food insecurity among students at UMBC, Dr. Nayak continues to guide me and provides feedback on each stage of the research process. After collecting and analyzing over 500 responses, I am now working on disseminating my findings beginning at UMBC’s spring Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day (URCAD).

Q: Are you currently part of a scholars program or Living Learning Community at UMBC?

A:  In addition to being a McNair Scholar, I am a member of UMBC’s Honors College and the Sondheim Public Affairs Scholars Program, a four-year scholarship program focused on community engagement and policy. As a Sondheim Scholar, I participated in a faculty-led study abroad summer course in Cape Town, South Africa, to learn about global community engagement and social change. In my first two years at UMBC, I was also a member of the Shriver Living Learning Community (LLC) for students passionate about service, leadership, and advocacy. I served as a peer mentor in my sophomore year, supporting first-year students as they transitioned to college. 

Q: What clubs, teams, or organizations are you a part of? What do you love about them?

A: I am the president of UMBC’s Public Health Council of Majors. I love planning professional development and social events to bring public health students together. In the past year, we have hosted events such as graduate school information sessions, internship panels, resume workshops in collaboration with the Career Center, and LinkedIn headshots, among others.

Q: How are you making a difference for other Retrievers?

A: Since my sophomore year, I have worked as an Academic Peer Advocate through UMBC’s Academic Success Center. In this role, I support other undergraduate students by connecting them to the great resources UMBC offers. Through the Shriver Center, I volunteered at the Great Kids Farm, a Baltimore City Public Schools farm-to-school program. Currently, I serve as a student ambassador for the Commodore Collegiates Program, a partnership between UMBC and Commodore John Rodgers Elementary/Middle School. I give students an exciting tour of UMBC, lead fun STEM activities, share my college experience, and engage them in discussions about college.

* * * * *

UMBC’s greatest strength is its people. When people meet Retrievers and hear about the passion they bring, the relationships they create, the ways they support each other, and the commitment they have to inclusive excellence, they truly get a sense of our community. That’s what “Meet a Retriever” is all about.

Learn more about Scholars Programs at UMBC.