“Greg has done an excellent job as Federal CIO and Chief AI Officer,” an OMB spokesperson told Nextgov/FCW. “He will certainly be missed when his time here comes to an end.” #
Federal CIO Greg Barbaccia is leaving government service, capping off an 18-month tenure as the government’s top IT lead where he sought to overhaul how the U.S. agencies acquire and interact with tech services.
Barbaccia will depart Aug. 31, according to a White House official with knowledge of the matter, who requested anonymity to communicate the departure. It’s not clear where Barbaccia is headed next.
The Office of Management and Budget confirmed his departure date.
“Greg has done an excellent job as Federal CIO and Chief AI Officer,” a spokesperson told Nextgov/FCW. “He will certainly be missed when his time here comes to an end.”
The move was first reported by FedScoop. Barbaccia joined OMB in January 2025 after a decade at Palantir and later stints at blockchain intelligence firm Elementus and Theorem, a machine-learning-enabled asset manager. A former Army intelligence sergeant and intelligence community analyst, Barbaccia had not worked in government since 2009 and had not previously served as an agency CIO.
Barbaccia was charged as federal CIO with overseeing governmentwide IT policy, helping shape the federal technology budget and setting the direction for agency modernization efforts. He also served as the federal chief AI officer and became the government’s service delivery lead under the Government Service Delivery Improvement Act.
During his tenure, he pushed agencies to rethink how they buy and manage technology, arguing that the government should default more often to buying commercial tools rather than building systems in-house. He also sought tougher enforcement of FITARA, the 2014 law giving agency CIOs authority over technology investments, and explored ways for OMB to more closely track major IT decisions across agencies.
Barbaccia also made culture a central theme of his tenure, saying his role had become less about “deep diving” into technical architecture and more about changing how the government thinks about technology, compliance and modernization. He pushed the federal CIO office to gather more feedback from agency technology leaders and sent staff into the field for in-person meetings with agencies.
“I came into the job thinking this would be much more of a technical undertaking about deep diving into technical systems and technical architecture,” he told Nextgov/FCW in February. “I’m understanding changing the culture and the way we think about tech and the government is a way more effective means of making change, so that's what I’m focused on — primarily changes across culture, tech and then the compliance regime.”
His departure comes after a turbulent period for the federal technology workforce, including Department of Government Efficiency’s push to downsize government as a whole, broad personnel losses across government — including portions of the federal tech workforce — and a reshuffling of many agency CIO roles. Barbaccia has acknowledged those disruptions but argued that artificial intelligence and a new early-career U.S. Tech Force program could help the government rebuild technical capacity.
Barbaccia also championed a “digital front door” for government services, questioning why taxpayers must repeatedly provide the same information to different agencies. That vision, he said, would require more responsible data sharing and a willingness to make difficult decisions around identity proofing, including the future of Login.gov and the government’s use of commercial identity tools.
During his tenure, the federal government began to confront a new class of advanced AI models that officials and researchers say will forever overhaul how organizations manage defensive and offensive cyber strategies. The models’ advent has raised ongoing questions for agency technology leaders about model-sharing and coordination amid a recent export control debacle that impacted parts of the government.
Nextgov/FCW Managing Editor Edward Graham contributed to this report.