The Undocumented Trust Chain — What Workforce Reductions Actually Broke

You know what happens when an intermediate certificate expires and nobody notices. The endpoints are still there. The relying parties haven't changed. Everything downstream looks configured. But the trust assertion that held the chain together is gone, and you find out when a handshake fails and nobody in the room can explain why.

Now apply that to people.

The roughly 238,000 net reduction in the federal workforce through 2025 (per Pew Research Center, drawing from OPM and OMB data) removed a specific class of organizational infrastructure: the people who knew why access configurations existed, how exception processes actually worked, and which system interdependencies were maintained by institutional memory rather than documentation. The SAML assertions still resolve. The service accounts still authenticate. But the knowledge about why they're shaped the way they are, what breaks if you change them, and who approved the exceptions that made them necessary left the building in a box of personal effects.

Call it lifecycle management at the organizational level. The lifecycle of the knowledge that made governing accounts possible, not any individual account or credential.

If you're selling into federal accounts right now, your buyer is living inside a broken trust chain. They may not have named it yet. That's your opening.

The baseline was already cracked

We need to be honest about what was already failing before the reductions compounded it.

The VA's Office of Inspector General published its FY2024 FISMA audit in June 2025, covering the period before DOGE-driven departures took effect. Independent auditors assessed 49 major applications and general support systems across 23 VA facilities. They found continuing deficiencies in access controls, configuration management, and security management. The specific recommendation: VA needed to ensure "consistent monitoring and reviewing of privileged accounts, service accounts, and accounts for individuals with access to source code repositories." Of 23 recommendations, VA concurred with only 12. Some addressed repeat deficiencies spanning multiple years.

Worth noting what the OIG is and isn't: this is a statutory watchdog with audit authority, not a policy shop with an agenda. When the OIG says service account governance was failing across VA systems, that's an audited finding, not an opinion. And it was failing before anyone left.

The people who understood which service accounts were legitimate, which were legacy artifacts, and which were workarounds someone created at 2 AM during an incident three years ago were the compensating control for a documentation gap the IG had been flagging for years. The compensating control just got decommissioned.

The IRS tells a parallel story. GAO's April 2026 audit found that IRS "did not consistently remove user access to some IT systems for employees who were placed on administrative leave." As of September 2025, IRS had 21 open GAO recommendations related to internal control over financial reporting, with new and continuing deficiencies in information systems. The audit period covers FY2025, exactly when IRS experienced thousands of departures.

The access wasn't removed because the process for removing it depended on people and workflows that were themselves disrupted. The system for governing access became ungovernable at the same moment the access itself became most dangerous.

If your buyer is at an agency with similar audit findings, the question that opens the conversation is simple: When was the last time someone reviewed your service account inventory, and is the person who conducted that review still on your team?

Where the analogy earns its weight, and where it misleads you

In a cryptographic trust chain, every link is explicit. You can inspect the certificate. You can check the signature. You can trace the chain to a root and verify it programmatically. When a link breaks, the failure is detectable.

This is where your certificate intuition helps. And this is where it starts to mislead you.

In an organizational trust chain, the links are implicit. The knowledge about why a federation trust relationship uses a specific claim mapping, or why a service account has an exception to your password rotation policy, or why a particular directory group has access to a system that doesn't appear in any architecture diagram: that knowledge lives in the person who configured it, or the person who inherited it and asked enough questions to understand it. When that person leaves, the failure is silent. There is no OCSP responder for institutional memory. You find out the chain is broken when you try to change something and it breaks something else nobody knew was connected.

Federal News Network reported in January 2026 on the disproportionate loss of mid-career technologists, the people "who bridge legacy systems knowledge with modern cloud and AI capabilities." (Federal News Network is a trade outlet covering the federal workforce; their sourcing on agency staffing tends to be solid, drawn from union contacts and agency insiders.) These are the people who had been in the systems long enough to know that the LDAP directory still feeds three downstream systems that aren't in the CMDB, that the service account running the nightly batch job was created by someone who retired in 2019, and that the federation trust with the partner agency passes a non-standard attribute because the partner's IdP couldn't handle the standard one.

Brookings' April 2026 analysis of federal AI adoption found that at least 25% of AI-specific job listings were posted from 2024 onward, meaning many of those hires were still probationary and among the most easily dismissed. The Federation of American Scientists put the consequence bluntly:

These were, in many cases, the people building the automation and governance tooling that was supposed to replace the undocumented knowledge with something auditable. The replacement got cut before it could replace anything.

The CISA case

CISA provides the sharpest illustration. By mid-2025, approximately 1,000 people had left the agency, nearly a third of its workforce. The Cybersecurity Division dropped from roughly 1,100 to 850. Two full red teams, over 100 people, were terminated within days of each other.

A red team's value lives in specific network topography of the systems they've tested. Any contractor can run a scanner. The red team knows which compensating controls are real and which are checkbox artifacts. They know where the gaps live between documented architecture and actual configuration. Critically, they know where identity is the actual attack surface: which service accounts have overprivileged access, which authentication boundaries are soft, where credential reuse creates lateral movement paths that don't show up in any access review. A CISA threat hunt advisory from July 2025 documented exactly this kind of finding at a critical infrastructure organization: local admin accounts with shared non-expiring passwords, credentials stored plaintext in batch scripts. Someone wrote those scripts. Someone knew they existed. That knowledge doesn't survive in the script itself.

That operational knowledge lives in the team's collective understanding of how identity infrastructure is actually configured versus how it's documented. When the team leaves, the documentation remains. The documentation was never complete.

So the question worth asking your buyer: Which of your current access controls depend on someone manually reviewing exceptions, and is that person still in the role?

The deprovisioning problem nobody can answer

If the undocumented trust chain describes knowledge walking out the door, there's a companion problem: access that should have walked out with it but didn't.

The Senate Homeland Security Committee's DOGE oversight report found that agency officials could not confirm whether former DOGE employees still had access to government data and systems. At GSA, senior officials "could not inform staff on DOGE employee adherence to privacy and cybersecurity policy, guidance, and existing statute." (This is a majority-staff report from a Democratic-led committee, so read it with appropriate awareness of institutional positioning. The specific factual claims about access governance failures are corroborated by GAO's independent work.) GAO found the Bureau of the Fiscal Service implemented only 5 of 14 cybersecurity controls for DOGE employee access. One employee was inadvertently granted temporary access to create, modify, and delete data in a payment system.

Provisioning happened outside normal controls. Deprovisioning couldn't be verified. And the people who would normally catch the gap in an access review may themselves be among the departed.

Lifecycle management when the lifecycle itself is undocumented. Your buyer should be able to answer this: How confident are you that access was fully revoked for everyone who departed in the last twelve months? Fully deprovisioned across every system, every credential, every service account linkage.

A note on the data you're working with

The baseline data about federal IT workforce capacity is fractured. OPM's FY2024 Human Capital Reviews, prior agency capacity assessments, headcount figures from before the reductions: none of these describe the buyer's current reality. The Federation of American Scientists notes that "it is now difficult to determine where federal AI talent resides or how much of that capacity remains in government" because entire digital teams were dissolved and the tracking mechanisms themselves were disrupted.

When your buyer tells you their team is "still assessing the impact," they may be telling you the literal truth. They don't have the data to know what they lost, because the people who maintained that data are gone too.

Where this lands

Your buyer is sitting on configurations they can see but may not understand. The service accounts are still running. The federation trusts are still resolving. The exception processes still have tickets in the queue. But the person who knew why the configuration looks the way it does, what it connects to that isn't documented, and what would break if it changed may no longer be reachable.

The questions that surface this pain are specific. If you needed to modify a federation trust configuration today, is the rationale for the current setup documented anywhere? That's a question with a testable answer, and at multiple agencies, the GAO, the VA OIG, and the Senate oversight committee have already documented that the answer is some version of "we don't know."

Your buyer may not have read those reports. But they're living inside the findings. The buyer's inability to answer your questions is the finding. The configuration is still there. The trust assertion is gone. Unlike a certificate, it won't throw an error until something breaks.