OPM brings on new IT chief

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has brought on someone to fill a top information technology role that has been vacant since the start of September. 

The agency announced Monday that David Garcia would serve as the OPM’s chief information officer effective immediately. 

The news comes roughly two months after reports surfaced that the agency would lose its CIO, Dave DeVries, after about a year on the job. DeVries left the position on Sept. 2 citing family considerations, the OPM told The Hill in August. 

{mosads}According to the agency, Garcia previously served at the helm of the department overseeing the state of Maryland’s IT operations. Garcia worked as the chief of information technology for the State of Maryland and secretary of the Department of Information Technology for two years before joining the OPM. 

The development is a positive one for the OPM, whose data security has been subject to scrutiny in recent years as a result of the 2015 breach that compromised the personal information of roughly 22 million Americans, most of them federal workers. 

DeVries was one of a slew of top IT officials who left the federal government over the summer, spotlighting the difficulty the government faces in recruiting and retaining tech and cybersecurity personnel.