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WASHINGTON — President Obama is considering removing Adm. Michael S. Rogers from his posts as leader of the National Security Agency and United States Cyber Command after top officials expressed frustration over the speed at which Admiral Rogers had moved to combat the Islamic State and over the agency’s repeated loss of closely guarded secrets, administration and intelligence officials said Saturday.
President-elect Donald J. Trump is considering Admiral Rogers, who is responsible for surveillance and the growing arsenal of cyberweapons, for a top post in his administration, including director of national intelligence overseeing all 16 intelligence agencies. Admiral Rogers met with Mr. Trump on Thursday, apparently without the White House’s knowledge.
The recommendation to remove Admiral Rogers, a career intelligence officer who was promoted to his posts by the Obama administration two years ago, came last month from Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter and the current director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr.
Administration and intelligence officials, who insisted on anonymity to detail the private discussions, said the recommendation that Admiral Rogers be removed was not related to Mr. Trump’s interest in hiring him. Instead, they argued, it was driven by breaches during Admiral Rogers’s tenure at the N.S.A. and his leadership of the agency.
The White House and the Pentagon declined to comment on Admiral Rogers’s fate. Reached by phone on Saturday afternoon, Admiral Rogers declined to comment.
The effort to force out Admiral Rogers, which was first reported by The Washington Post, puts Mr. Trump in the position of considering whether to name, as the man who would brief him on intelligence matters each morning, a four-star admiral whom the White House is considering relieving of his posts.
It also raises the question of why Mr. Obama would consider firing one of the nation’s top intelligence officers in the last days of his administration. Admiral Rogers’s replacement would not be confirmed until after Mr. Trump takes over. One senior intelligence official argued that letting word of the effort leak seemed more about politics or vengeance than about effecting any real change.
Representative Devin Nunes of California, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a member of Mr. Trump’s transition team, strongly defended Admiral Rogers. In a letter to Mr. Carter and Mr. Clapper, Mr. Nunes asked them to testify before his committee to explain why they want to push Mr. Rogers out. “It’s not by accident that Admiral Rogers meets with the president-elect and two days later this story, which is completely built on lies, appears,” Mr. Nunes said in a short interview.
Mr. Carter and Mr. Clapper had submitted a formal recommendation to the White House to split the N.S.A., which conducts foreign surveillance and secures military networks, from the still-new Cyber Command. But there are questions inside the giant complex at Fort Meade, Md., where the N.S.A. and Cyber Command are housed, about whether the military cyberunit is ready to survive on its own. It relies heavily on the talent of the N.S.A., which dates back to the early 1950s.
Mr. Trump, who has begun filling the top echelons of his national security team with hard-liners, met with Admiral Rogers on Thursday at Trump Tower in New York.
Senior Defense Department and intelligence officials were surprised that Admiral Rogers, while on personal leave, had paid a visit to Mr. Trump.
Mr. Carter’s first major disagreement with Admiral Rogers dates to the fall of 2015, when he expressed mounting frustration that Cyber Command, which is responsible for offensive action against adversaries, was not acting aggressively enough to disrupt the Islamic State’s networks in Iraq and Syria.
In the spring, Mr. Carter said for the first time that the United States was using its cyberarsenal against the Islamic State. But the effort was moving too slowly for the Pentagon leadership, and Mr. Carter went to Fort Meade several weeks ago to give Admiral Rogers and his team “a kick in the pants,” one official said.
Top national security officials had also come to see Admiral Rogers as lacking leadership at a moment of wrenching change for the N.S.A. He took command after the disclosures of widespread surveillance by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, and the efforts he directed to seal up the agency proved insufficient, they said.
That perception was underlined by the disclosure in October that the F.B.I. had secretly arrested a former N.S.A. contractor, Harold T. Martin III, and was investigating whether he had stolen and disclosed highly classified computer code developed by the agency to hack into the networks of foreign governments.
Mr. Martin was charged with theft of government property and the unauthorized removal or retention of classified documents.
Administration officials had planned to relieve Admiral Rogers of his duties after the election and announce a plan to create separate chains of command for the N.S.A. and Cyber Command. But the plan, supported by Mr. Carter and Mr. Clapper, stalled in part because of opposition from Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who heads the Armed Services Committee.
Under the plan, Cyber Command would remain under the Armed Services Committee’s jurisdiction, but oversight of the N.S.A. would shift to the Senate Intelligence Committee. Mr. Trump’s victory complicated the planning.
On one major issue, Mr. Trump and Admiral Rogers disagree — quite publicly.
While Mr. Trump has insisted that no one knows whether Russia was responsible for the hacking of email accounts of the Democratic National Committee and a range of prominent formal officials, Admiral Rogers has said he has no doubt. He recently said that “this was not something that was done casually, this was not something that was done by chance, this was not a target that was selected purely arbitrarily.”
He added, “This was a conscious effort by a nation-state to attempt to achieve a specific effect.”
Coming into the job, Admiral Rogers said one of his top goals was to make sure that cyberattacks on the United States had consequences for the attackers. In August, he proposed a series of possible options to respond to the attacks, which American intelligence officials, in a public statement, said the Kremlin’s leadership had to have been aware of. But the White House rejected the proposals, fearing that they could start an escalating cyberconflict that the United States might not be able to win decisively.
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