Energy appoints Twitter, Google and DOGE alum as new CIO

The Energy Department named Ross Graber its new chief information officer this week, multiple sources told Nextgov/FCW.

Graber replaces former SpaceX employee Ryan Riedel, who left Energy last week after a tenure of less than two months as CIO. Dawn Zimmer briefly stepped into the acting CIO role — for a second time in as many months — before Graber was internally named CIO this week.

Graber most recently supported the nascent Department of Government Efficiency’s work at the State Department, a State Department official told Nextgov/FCW. 

Graber has significant experience in IT security, cybersecurity, IT risk management and compliance. He began his career at EY in the early 2000s, and later worked at Yahoo as an IT audit manager before a four-year stint with Google as a security and privacy technical program manager from 2009 to 2013. He spent another four years with Twitter — now known as X — serving as a risk and data analytics senior manager upon his exit.

Beginning in 2020, he had served as the senior director of security engineering for Procore Technologies, a construction management software-as-a-service company. That position ended in February, according to his LinkedIn profile. 

The Energy Department did not respond to a request for comment.