Billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has a key ally in the US Department of the Treasury: Tom Krause, a veteran technology executive who’s now a special government employee, or consultant, at the agency. Until a federal
judge temporarily blocked DOGE’s access on Saturday, Krause had “read-only” access to Treasury’s payments system, which handles more than 1.2 billion transactions a year. The government calls it “America’s checkbook,” an essential window into the federal spending that President Donald Trump is looking to slash by $1 trillion or more.
Krause, 47, who’s serving as fiscal assistant secretary at Treasury, will keep his day job: chief executive officer of Cloud Software Group, which owns a company called
Citrix Systems. His deep cost-cutting there shows why he may have appealed to Trump and Musk, the president’s adviser and Tesla Inc.’s CEO—and also why some people familiar with Krause’s record are unsettled about his new government role.
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Using a time-honored playbook, Citrix’s new owners financed the purchase mostly by loading up the company with debt—and then started eliminating thousands of employees to cut costs. Its financial results are improving.
But investing in cybersecurity isn’t like buying, and turning around, a struggling chain that sells groceries or furniture. It means handling risks to critical services more like those of owning a hospital or medical practice—matters of life or death where PE cost-cutting has provoked
congressional inquiries.
At Citrix, employees raised an alarm about Krause’s approach and say their fears were borne out. Losing personnel left security software and hardware more vulnerable as bad actors stepped up their attacks, according to interviews with a dozen former Citrix staffers. They include executives, managers and software engineers involved in security. Many were dismissed after the buyout, and most asked for anonymity to discuss sensitive internal matters.
Hugh Boyd worked for 14 years at Citrix as a product security engineer before he lost his job in January 2024. Boyd, who says he’d been planning to retire anyway, notes that the company’s software includes millions of lines of code and complicated systems that have to work together to provide protection.
“What they did is probably one of the single biggest mistakes you can make in a security organization,” he says of the new owners’ staff reductions. “If you start running people off who are highly qualified and who have been doing this at the company for years, you’re really putting yourself in a precarious position from a security standpoint.”
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After the company instituted cuts, intruders infiltrated Citrix’s products in two major hacks. In 2023, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, the US government’s top online watchdog, ranked two vulnerabilities in Citrix software as the No. 1 and No. 2 most exploited flaws by hackers.
