CMS CIO Patrick Newbold Exits Nov. 27 as HHS IT Bench Runs Thin

Patrick Newbold leaves the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services on Nov. 27, closing a two-year run as the agency's chief information officer. His successor is not a permanent appointee. Mark Plaugher, director of CMS's Information Systems Group, will serve as acting CIO — and a public agency organization chart already lists him in that role, suggesting the transition was planned well before the announcement.

Federal News Network reported the departure first. Newbold confirmed it to FedScoop on Thursday. The gap between a quiet org-chart edit and a public confirmation is worth noting. Agencies rarely flag acting arrangements in advance unless the seat will stay warm for some time.

What did Newbold actually deliver?

His tenure coincided with a broad consolidation of IT functions across the Department of Health and Human Services under President Donald Trump. CMS, like its sister agencies, folded technology operations toward the department level. Newbold led the agency through that shift. What the consolidation saved in dollars, if anything, has not been disclosed.

The headline metric his shop promoted most often was AI adoption: roughly 80% of the CMS workforce used AI tools, including the agency's internal "CMS Chat." Adoption is not outcome. Newbold himself conceded the point near the end of his tenure, saying the agency was pivoting from AI usage counts toward results, supported by an internal forum called Tech Pulse.

"Instead of leading with AI, we're going back and we're leading with outcomes," Newbold said on a panel in September. "And if it just so happens that AI is helping meet those outcomes, that's a good thing."

Read that closely. The agency spent two years publicizing an 80% usage figure, then its departing CIO reframed the mission — a tacit admission that usage statistics alone proved little about productivity, cost or service quality at an agency that processes health coverage for tens of millions of Americans. No outcome data accompanied the pivot. None has been published.

Who is Plaugher, and who came before?

Plaugher currently directs the CMS Information Systems Group. His installation as acting CIO follows standard federal practice: hold the seat, keep the lights on, await a political appointment that may or may not arrive.

Newbold's résumé runs deeper than most agency CIOs. Per his LinkedIn:

• Global deputy CIO at NASA
• CIO of the Social Security Administration
• Career start with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as deputy CIO and director of IT

He also stayed wired into the government IT establishment. Newbold sits on ACT-IAC's government leadership council and remains a board member of the General Services Administration's Technology Modernization Fund, the intragovernmental vehicle that finances agency IT projects. The TMF role pays no obvious dividend to CMS directly, but it kept the outgoing CIO inside the room where federal IT funding decisions get shaped. Whether he retains that seat after leaving CMS was not stated.

How hollow is the HHS technology bench?

The departure lands on unstable ground. Several high-ranking IT positions across HHS have no permanent official:

• David Hong holds two acting roles simultaneously: department CIO and department AI chief
• Steve Warren serves as acting CIO at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
• The department's chief technology officer seat remains vacant outright

That means the department that runs Medicare, Medicaid, CDC systems and federal health data exchanges has no permanently confirmed leader for any of its top technology posts. Newbold's exit removes one more confirmed name from that roster. The department has announced no timeline for filling the vacancies.

What should CIOs take from this?

Two lessons. First, the 80% AI adoption claim that CMS marketed for two years now sits effectively retired by its own author — evidence that usage metrics age poorly when outcomes go unpublished. Second, federal IT leadership continuity at HHS is thinner than the org charts suggest. Acting officials double-hatting roles make vendor accountability and project ownership harder, not easier, for anyone contracting with these agencies. Newbold's last day is Nov. 27. After that, every CMS technology decision runs through an acting CIO with no confirmed successor named.