NSA Begins Biggest Reorganization in a Decade — Five Mission Centers, China and AI First

The National Security Agency is heading into its largest internal overhaul in at least a decade, a redesign built around China and artificial intelligence rather than the directorates that have defined Fort Meade for years.

The Washington Post first reported the plan Sunday, citing current and former officials briefed on it. Army Gen. Joshua M. Rudd, who took over as NSA director in March and also commands U.S. Cyber Command, presented the design to senior agency leaders last week. It creates five new organizations at headquarters: artificial intelligence, China, cybersecurity, combat support or warfighting, and global intelligence. Each will be run by a newly elevated “mission director” with authority officials compared to a deputy director.

The timetable is short. Mission directors are expected to deliver their own organizational charts to Rudd by the end of September. Rollout is slated for mid-October. Full operating capacity is set for mid-January 2027. Rudd told the Senate Intelligence Committee in January that his “first priority is speed,” then scale, innovation, and integration. “We’ve got to move as fast as we can to ensure that we’ve got the right technologies, the right capabilities and [be] able to generate multiple options.”

Officials said some of the new chiefs, including the head of the AI center, have already been chosen and could be named internally as soon as Monday. Rudd has also considered candidates from outside the building, a step that unsettled career officers, according to former officials. Deputy Director Tim Kosiba is working the change with him.

The elite hacking unit Tailored Access Operations, reconstituted under its old name in July after years on the shelf, will sit under the global-intelligence director. Officials said TAO is in line for a larger budget when the new fiscal year opens Oct. 1.

NSA employs more than 30,000 military and civilian personnel, a workforce larger than the CIA’s. Its budget sits inside the classified “black budget.” The last reorganization of this scale, NSA21 under Adm. Michael Rogers in 2016, tried to fuse offense and defense. Current and former officers still describe that shuffle as unfinished business that left more confusion than speed. A later effort, EVO25, started at the beginning of President Trump’s second term and was dropped.

Rudd has been blunt about the risk. He “admitted that they don’t know how they are going to do it, so they are going to rush into reversible decisions, in case it is wrong,” one former official told the Post. A current official and a former official both said Rudd and Kosiba know the pace will “break things” inside a slow bureaucracy and that they will have to correct on the fly.

The China center is the political signal. NSA stood up a China Strategy Center in 2023. On Sept. 8 the agency joined the FBI and CISA in an advisory naming six Chinese AI firms accused of stripping capabilities from American models. A June presidential memorandum ordered faster AI adoption across military and intelligence missions and tighter protection of that work from adversaries. The new org chart makes those priorities the spine of the agency instead of offices attached to older directorates.