OPM reveals new details about its CIO

The government’s HR agency is touting the resume of its new chief information officer over three weeks after his appointment to the role. The new details on his background follow Nextgov/FCW reporting on the questions raised by the Office of Personnel Management’s unique privacy impact assessment that this new CIO signed for the controversial government-wide email system the agency is currently being sued over. 

Greg Hogan doesn’t have executive or people management experience, he told staff at the agency, as Nextgov/FCW has reported. He’s an alum of Comma.ai, which makes driver assistance tech to make cars semi-autonomous. 

After publication of this article, an OPM spokesperson denied that Hogan said that he didn't have executive or people management experience, and pointed to his management tenure at Comma.ai.

In his new job at OPM, Hogan is in charge of leading the agencies’ tech strategy, policies and cyber posture.

“Greg Hogan [was] most recently VP of Infrastructure at Comma.ai, almost 7 years there before joining the federal government, he has 24 years of experience in the private sector, and has a degree in Computer Engineering,” an OPM spokesperson said in a statement after Nextgov/FCW reported on Hogan’s background and the PIA.

Hogan appears to have technical coding experience. A GitHub profile associated with his name and Comma.ai last had active contributions in December. 

He was quickly installed in OPM’s CIO role after President Donald Trump took office and the agency’s career CIO, Melvin Brown II, was moved out of that position just one week after assuming it. 

“Melvin Brown has no technical background and served in the CIO role for one week,” the OPM spokesperson said. 

Brown is extremely well-regarded throughout the federal IT space and within OPM, where employees were shocked to see him moved out of the role, one current OPM employee not authorized to speak on the record, and two former federal tech executives, told Nextgov/FCW. 

Brown doesn’t have a technical degree, but he does have a masters degree in cybersecurity policy, according to his LinkedIn profile. He’s won two Federal 100 awards, meant to recognize outstanding contributions in federal IT, and has worked in federal technology space — including leading tech offices — since 2005. 

OPM itself recently wrote that a “modern agency CIO … does not spend his days writing complex lines of code, setting up secure networks, or performing other ‘highly technical’ tasks,” in a memo that could open the door to politicizing CIOs. “Instead, he crafts and effectuates policy, and sets and deploys his budget, based on his Administration’s priorities.”

“Many federal CIOs, due to the complexity of the federal IT environment, are not hands on with technical implementations,” one former government tech executive told Nextgov/FCW, although they noted that it seems like the DOGE is looking for more technical leadership than the type of senior IT management backgrounds of the current CIO cadre. 

Another noted that chief technology officer roles are more designed to contribute that tech implementation expertise, in addition to other tech talent in agencies.

“The role of the CIO is primarily to develop and lead a strategy that enables and supports the mission objectives, lining up resources, personnel, and budgets to drive those objectives and outcomes,” they said. “It’s an executive management role, rather than a hands-on engineering role.”

A recent lawsuit against the agency alleges that OPM broke the law by not releasing a privacy impact assessment before deploying the email system used to send feds a controversial and legally suspect delayed resignation offer.