This is...
Odd, to put it mildly...
The U.S. Navy has replaced the admiral in charge of the Office of Naval Research with a civilian who has reportedly worked as a Department of Government Efficiency staffer, according to the service.
Rear Adm. Kurt. Rothenhaus, who has served as chief of naval research since June 2023, has been reassigned and replaced by Rachel Riley, who most recently acted as a senior adviser for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, a Navy public affairs official confirmed in an emailed statement Thursday.
Riley worked at HHS as part of DOGE, the The New York Times previously reported, a job her LinkedIn profile shows her holding since January 2025.
Full article, HERE from Navy Times.
I have to say this one makes no sense to me. I worked there for 13 years, granted for an SES and GS-15, but the leadership were a Navy Rear Admiral (usually with R&D or acquisition background), and a senior Navy Captain as the XO.
Riley has no R&D or acquisition background but apparently was a ‘team lead’ in organizational transformation and organizational design for efficiency and speed of government organizations. And apparently she also worked on Chinese issues, in addition to being fluent in Chinese... Odd...
I can’t help but wonder how she will get the clearances she needs to be involved with certain projects/programs, much less understand the details of advanced research programs.
But that’s just me, and I’m no longer there. But I have heard a few folks I knew are bailing after the news...
Sigh...
It could just be that they needed him more in the Information Warfare command because something's going on there and they needed his expertise and they stuck Riley there as a stopgap because they had no idea who else to plug in there?
Because his new job is the kind of thing in this day that's a 'hot' position and you need someone good in there now?
It might be odd, but it would also be helpful to have someone in charge who isn't after just making their name as "The Rickover of <something>" in the couple of years they have at the helm. Some things just take longer to bring to usefulness than an admiral will see done while he's there. And then programs that the nation really could use, or needs, don't get pursued, or get cancelled, because the new person in charge isn't interested in having the credit go to the next guy in the chair.
(OldNFO, you and I might actually know each other in the real world. I never worked at ONR, but did work on a program or two funded out of there.)