The National Security Agency has lost several hundred top-tier professionals to the private sector since 2015 over low pay and morale and an unpopular reorganization, The Washington Post reports.
The mass exodus of hackers, data scientists and engineers is potentially a major hit to national security, the Post reported.
"Some synonym of the word 'epidemic' is the best way to describe it," former NSA senior researcher Ellison Anne Williams told the Post. "The agency is losing an amazing amount of its strongest technical talent, and to lose your best and brightest staff is a huge hit."
Williams left the NSA in 2016 to start her own data-security firm and took more than 10 co-workers with her, the Post reported.
The NSA, which boasts 21,000 civilian personnel, would not disclose how many vacancies it has, but said its attrition rate among math, science and technology personnel is 5.6 percent and up to 9 percent among hackers, the Post reported.
Further challenging the NSA's model to retain top talent are the near 300,000 vacant cybersecurity jobs in the private sector that pay junior personnel around $200,000 to start, the Post reports.
"The big change these days is there's a supply-demand imbalance between the outside and the inside," NSA Deputy Director George Barnes told the Post.
Regardless, it has been a tumultuous reign under NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers, who plans to retire in the spring, the Post reports.
Rogers, whose agency reorganization caused much of the distress within the NSA, has been the frontman of an agency rife with security breaches who has had to endure a challenging transition between administrations while being part of an intelligence community that has been questioned by President Donald Trump over Russia's interference in the 2016 election, the Post reports.
"NSA always recovers," one former official told the Post.
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