Now a little more than four months into the second Trump administration, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has appointed a new chief information officer (CIO), Eric Sidle, with experience in the electric vehicle space and with a former position at tech giant Apple, Inc. on his resume.
The appointment coincides with an injunction from a federal judge barring a whole host of federal departments, including HUD, from carrying out mass firings.
New HUD CIO
Sidle most recently worked at consulting firm Fabrum Advisors Acting CIO Juan Sargent, who previously served as deputy CIO, has returned to that position, according to HUD’s leadership webpage.
HUD notified staff of Sidle’s appointment on Wednesday in a memo obtained by FedScoop, which stated that he will “use his invaluable experience as a tech leader to help things run smoothly so we can continue our important mission of promoting the American Dream of homeownership and serving rural, tribal and urban communities.”
At Apple, Sidle worked on the team managing systems development of its MacBook Pro series of computer laptops. He has also held positions at Raytheon and Hewlett Packard (HP).
Interestingly, Sidle served four years at ChargePoint, an EV equipment manufacturing company. FedScoop noted that while several CIOs at other departments had prior ties with Elon Musk, ChargePoint has been a competitor with Musk’s Tesla for years.
Judge pauses RIFs
Sidle joins HUD at a fractious time for federal agencies and their employees. In February, HUD was one of the agencies targeted by President Trump’s executive order on workforce optimization, which called for agency heads to “coordinate and consult with DOGE to shrink the size of the federal workforce and limit hiring to essential positions.” At one point, HUD’s union president told Bloomberg that HUD planned to “discharge 50% of its workforce.”
However, the downsizing effort has faced legal headwinds and several agencies, including HUD, are currently barred from instituting further mass reductions in force (RIFs). On Friday, federal judge Susan Illston of the Northern District of California issued an injunction after “finding the president likely acted outside his legal and constitutional powers,” according to reporting at Government Executive.
The order applies to several agencies including HUD and the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Energy, Health and Human Services, Interior, Labor, State, Treasury, Transportation and Veterans Affairs.
It also applies to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the U.S. DOGE Service, AmeriCorps, Peace Corps, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the General Services Administration (GSA), the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Small Business Administration (SBA) and the Social Security Administration (SSA), according to the reporting.
The judge ruled that the president must seek these RIFs through Congress via authorization, and called previously instituted RIFs “hastily constructed and likely unconstitutional.”
Trump’s OMB leader Russell Vought defended the firings as legal in a discussion with reporters on Thursday.
“They’ve been an effort to scale down the federal workforce with care, with wisdom about what’s necessary to statutorily conduct and operate agencies,” Vought said according to the report. “And I think at the end of the day, wherever they’re at, they’re going to be successful when they get to the Supreme Court.”
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