The Office of Personnel Management's chief information officer, Donna Seymour, resigned Monday, two days before she was scheduled to face a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on the theft of data from the OPM's network discovered last year. A spokesperson for the OPM confirmed to Ars that Seymour had resigned, saying "she has retired."

Seymour told colleagues at the OPM in an e-mail message that she was departing to make sure that her presence at the office "does not distract from the great work this team does every single day for this agency and the American people," according to a report by USA Today's Erin Kelly.

House Oversight Committee chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) cancelled the planned hearing for Wednesday on the OPM hack. "Ms. Seymour’s retirement is good news and an important turning point for OPM," he commented in a prepared statement. "While I am disappointed Ms. Seymour will no longer appear before our Committee this week to answer to the American people, her retirement is necessary and long overdue. On her watch, whether through negligence or incompetence, millions of Americans lost their privacy and personal data. The national security implications of this entirely foreseeable breach are far-reaching and long-lasting. OPM now needs a qualified CIO at the helm to right the ship and restore confidence in the agency."

Seymour, a career civil servant who came to the OPM from the Department of Defense in 2013, had no previous direct experience in computer security, though she had served as a chief information officer at several agencies. At the Department of Defense, she served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Office of Warrior Care Policy and the Principal Director for Civilian Personnel Policy, where she handled human resources management policy for the nearly 1 million non-military employees of the DOD. She had also previously been the DOD's executive director for Enterprise Human Resource Information Systems.

When she arrived at the OPM, she inherited a raft of IT problems, including well-documented issues in security and software project management, particularly around the office's EPIC system—the collection of systems involved in the OPM's role in managing background investigations for Federal employees.

In 2014, the "EPIC Transformation" project—an ongoing modernization program for the software that investigators at the OPM and its contractors used to collect and manage investigation data, including vast amounts of personally identifiable information on both current and potential federal employees and contractors—was "rebaselined" (essentially, sent back to the drawing board) after floundering for nearly seven years.

The parts of the system that were in place failed to meet security guidelines and were in essence operating in violation of federal regulations. A 2014 OPM Inspector General report urged Seymour and then-OPM Director Katherine Archuleta to shut the systems down until they were given official "Authority To Operate" because they posed a risk to national security.

Seymour convinced Archuleta to ignore those pleas. And within months, hackers alleged to be operating from China had infiltrated the OPM's network.

Seymour's departure came on the same day that it was announced that the Department of Education's CIO, Danny Harris, would be leaving by the end of the month. Harris was under fire on multiple fronts, facing not just criticism of Education's cybersecurity footing but investigations of misconduct by Congress. According to a statement from Education's press secretary Dorie Turner Nolt, Harris was “becoming a distraction to the department’s critical ongoing cybersecurity work.”

Earlier this month, immediately following testimony before Rep. Chaffetz's House Oversight Committee, Harris collapsed and was taken to the hospital. Rep. Chaffetz had called out Harris for Education's failure to meet security goals set in the "cyber sprint" mandated by the Obama administration following the OPM breach. Chaffetz had said that "by virtually every metric," Harris was "failing to adequately secure the department’s systems.”

Harris had been the subject of an Inspector General investigation and was facing accusations of using Education Department subordinates to help operate side businesses he was running (including car detailing and home theater installation), failing to report the income from those businesses on his tax return, and having an improper relationship dating back to the early 2000s with a federal contractor, who in 2005 was given a no-bid exclusive contract for IT support for which Harris was the program manager.