The firing of two top officials at the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command last week has rattled the cyber community, lawmakers from both parties and experts, prompting concerns that President Donald Trump’s administration’s tack on cyber threats against the U.S. is dangerously rudderless.

The administration inexplicably fired Air Force Gen. Timothy Haugh, head of both the NSA and CyberCom, and the NSA deputy director, Wendy Noble, on April 3 — both well-respected within the agencies and on Capitol Hill, current and former officials said — amid news reports that a far-right conspiracy theorist bent the ear of the president to ensure their ouster on grounds of perceived disloyalty.

Since then, the administration has not offered concrete justifications for their removals outside of a brief statement from the Pentagon’s top spokesperson, Sean Parnell. Following the firings, he thanked Haugh for “his decades of service to our nation” but did not offer details on the ouster.

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The abrupt and opaque firings of two top officials charged with collecting intelligence on and countering the onslaught of cyber threats against the U.S. in recent years was shocking to those in the community, according to experts and current and former officials.

It reinforced uncertainty about the administration’s view of cybersecurity even as adversaries like China tacitly acknowledged Beijing was behind one of the most concerning known series of cyber attacks on American infrastructure in history last year, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

“At best, it is incompetence and lack of consideration on the impact of the cyber mission they claim is important,” a service member who works in cybersecurity told Military.com on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak to the press. “And at worst, it is an intentional destruction of cybersecurity talent and capabilities within the government.”

That uncertainty was further exacerbated by impending cuts at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, and Trump’s recent executive order to revoke the security clearance of the agency’s former chief, Christopher Krebs, for defending the integrity of the 2020 election, which the president has falsely claimed was rigged for him to lose.

It also came on the heels of the so-called Signalgate, in which top administration officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, shared sensitive military information via a civilian messaging app after accidentally adding a journalist for The Atlantic to the thread. That incident led to widespread concern about the handling of classified information among administration leaders and an ongoing inspector general probe.

The firings last week also prompted immediate backlash from lawmakers, to include some Republicans, who generally lambasted the move as politically motivated and destructive to the country’s cybersecurity efforts.

“Gen. Tim Haugh is an outstanding leader and was doing a superb job at Cyber Command and National Security Agency. He was fired with no public explanation,” Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., said on social media last week. “This action sets back our cyber and signals intelligence operations.”

Within the cyber community, there had been hope that — because of the critical importance of the mission and ongoing threats from China, Russia and Iran — agencies tasked with defending the country from those perils would be spared from sweeping cuts to the federal government under the Trump administration. But “that’s just proven not to be true,” the service member who works in cybersecurity said.

“There’s a lot of distractions right now,” they added, alluding to rumors within the community that agency missions could be directed toward cartels, which the administration has designated as foreign terrorists, instead of focusing on near-peer threats from China and Russia.

“That never breeds good strategic planning or long-term efforts, because everyone doesn’t know what the future looks like,” they said, noting that the perceived political motivations for firing Haugh, an appointee of the Biden administration, “feels very risky” to the apolitical mission of defending the country from ongoing cyber incursions from near-peer nations.

Laura Loomer, a political activist and Trump media surrogate, claimed on social media that she was behind the officials’ ouster, marking them as “Biden holdovers” disloyal to the current administration without citing specific examples of their unreliability. She previously had a hand in ousting top National Security Council officials, The New York Times reported.

“Not only have both dutifully served this nation for decades under both Democratic and Republican administrations, but their removals were conducted in the middle of the night with no consultation with Congress and, according to reports, at the behest of a private citizen who has a record of promoting conspiracy theories,” two dozen Democratic senators, including those on the Intelligence and Armed Services committees, said in a statement following the firings.

“These actions severely compromise our ability to keep Americans safe,” the lawmakers said.

Late last year, U.S. officials announced that a hacking group widely believed to be affiliated with the Chinese government had breached U.S. infrastructure systems, sending a shockwave through the cyber community about lurking threats from Beijing. Those hacks reportedly included the collection of data from high-profile U.S. officials like former Vice President Kamala Harris, current Vice President JD Vance and Trump himself.

Law enforcement and cybersecurity agencies issued alarming warnings about the attacks in the following months, noting that these Chinese-backed hacking groups known as Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon, were undeterred and had used “living off the land,” or LOTL, techniques that allow hackers to nest themselves in legitimate software but exploit it for what officials called “illegitimate” purposes, such as attacks on infrastructure, Military.com previously reported.

The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that Chinese officials secretly acknowledged that Beijing was responsible for those attacks, a rare move that the publication said would not have occurred without approval from top officials in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s government, citing experts and saying that it was a sign of escalating cyber tensions between the U.S. and China.

Retired Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, a senior fellow focused on cyber threats at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Military.com in an interview that Haugh was “the best possible four-star” to lead the NSA and Cyber Command, adding that officers with that level of expertise are hard to come by in those fields.

“My gut reaction is that this was completely inappropriate,” Montgomery said. “These are hard billets to fill because, in a lot of cases, many of our senior officers have not had the appropriate jobs ahead of time to kind of do this.”

Haugh was replaced by Army Lt. Gen. William Hartman, who is now in charge of both CyberCom and the NSA. Noble was reportedly reassigned following her removal as NSA deputy director.

The leader of the agencies has assumed a dual-hat role since 2010, overseeing the cyber intelligence gathering of the NSA and the offensive and defensive operations of CyberCom. Now, there are concerns that the organizations will be split under the administration, hampering the “utility of working closely with the other one and the value in being as integrated as they are,” the service member said.

Hartman has recently argued to keep the agencies linked.

“I’ve continued to see this partnership evolve, and our ability to execute increasingly more precise operations is fundamentally because the dual hat allows me, in my current capacity, to move with the speed and agility and unity of effort that is required,” Hartman said Wednesday at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services subcommittee on cybersecurity. “It also forces leaders across the organization to collaborate, to do the hard work, and to provide the best options for the national security of the country.”

Retired Gen. Michael Hayden, who served as director of the CIA under President George W. Bush and briefly under President Barack Obama, as well as director of the National Security Administration under former President Bill Clinton, thought highly of Haugh.

Hayden said he met with Haugh for upward of an hour in-person ahead of his confirmation, telling Military.com in an interview this week that “he was more prepared than I ever was.”

The retired general is no stranger to the political process, recalling when he was let go from his role with the CIA under Obama. But Hayden also got a phone call from the president explaining the circumstances, and he feels norms like that are changing under the second Trump administration.

“The second administration is now in, and I’m really, really worried about that,” Hayden told Military.com. “In fact, if people came to me today and said, ‘I think I want to go to [the] CIA or NSA’ I would say, ‘Uh, let’s talk about it, because I’m not so sure.'”

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