Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush said Tuesday that if he were in the White House he would have already fired the head of the Office of Personnel Management for allowing it to be vulnerable to the Chinese cyberattack that breached the data of millions of federal workers.
Bush, a guest on Bill Bennett's Morning in America, called it "outrageous" that the OPM knew that hackers could attack and nothing was done to shore up its cyber defenses.
"Just as has been the case across the board when we have this sheer incompetence or scandalous behavior, there is no accountability," Bush said. "No one seems to be fired. If I was President of the United States that person would be fired. They did not follow up on the inspector general’s recommendations to tighten up security to create a stronger firewall. The net result is that the Chinese—apparently the Chinese have had access to this information for over a year and it is a dangerous threat to our national security."
Full exchange:
BILL BENNETT: You wrote a piece, or it's pending to be published this morning, about cybersecurity. Related issue, of course we read this morning that this OPM violation may have been four times larger than we thought, so how secure are we? But what about cybersecurity and the situation with OPM?
JEB BUSH: It’s outrageous because we know—we’ve known—that the Chinese government or state sponsored Chinese activity has been targeting. As Michael Hayden said we would be doing the same thing with them. That’s part of what counterintelligence work is about. We know that they’re trying to do this and the inspector general of OPM has made it clear that OPM was vulnerable. All of the personnel data for the federal government are in this—are the responsibility of OPM and you have a political hack, you have the national political director of the Obama reelection campaign as the head of this. And just as has been the case across the board when we have this sheer incompetence or scandalous behavior, there is no accountability. No one seems to be fired. If I was President of the United States that person would be fired. They did not follow up on the inspector general’s recommendations to tighten up security to create a stronger firewall. The net result is that the Chinese—apparently the Chinese have had access to this information for over a year and it is a dangerous threat to our national security. And the reaction is always the same, ‘well the dog ate my homework.’ And this is a dangerous thing so I just think cybersecurity across the board, whether it’s commercial espionage against our businesses or against—direct attacks against our government is something that we need to be much more vigilant on and make it front and center on negotiations and conversations with China for sure.