(DCNF)—Microsoft has relied on engineers based in China for years to help maintain some of the U.S. Department of Defense’s (DOD) most sensitive cloud computing systems, potentially leaving them vulnerable to hacking, according to a new investigation from ProPublica released Tuesday.
Because U.S. law prohibits foreign nationals from directly accessing federal systems that handle sensitive data, Microsoft has been funneling work through American “digital escorts” — low-paid workers with security clearances but often possessing limited technical expertise — who input commands from more skilled China-based engineers into federal networks, according to ProPublica. The arrangement, largely unknown even within the federal government, is raising alarms among national security and cybersecurity experts as the engineers could gain access to sensitive government data with little oversight, potentially exposing critical systems to Chinese cyber espionage.
The system has reportedly been in place for over a decade, ProPublica reported. China remains America’s top cyber security adversary, posing both a threat to government and private sector entities, according to a February 2024 report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
This arrangement is used to handle “high impact level” information, which includes “data that involves the protection of life and financial ruin,” where “loss of confidentiality, integrity, or availability could be expected to have a severe or catastrophic adverse effect on organizational operations, organizational assets, or individuals,” according to U.S. government policy reviewed by ProPublica. The escorts effectively act as middlemen, copying and pasting commands from foreign workers into Pentagon-linked systems, in some cases without fully understanding the functions of those commands.
“We’re trusting that what they’re doing isn’t malicious, but we really can’t tell,” one escort, who works for Microsoft contractor Insight Global and spoke on condition of anonymity, told ProPublica. “They’re telling nontechnical people very technical directions,” the current Insight Global escort said, adding that the foreign engineer could install an update allowing an outsider to access the network.
“If I were an operative, I would look at that as an avenue for extremely valuable access. We need to be very concerned about that,” Harry Coker, former senior executive at the CIA and the National Security Agency, told ProPublica.
Over the years, various individuals involved in the work told ProPublica that they had warned the company about the risks. Despite the presence of an escort with a security clearance, ProPublica found that foreign engineers have access to details about the federal clouds that hackers can exploit.
“If someone ran a script called ‘fix_servers.sh’ but it actually did something malicious then [escorts] would have no idea,” a former Microsoft engineer who worked on the escort system, told ProPublica.
Microsoft told the DCNF that its personnel and contractors are audited by the U.S. government, and that the Chinese engineers in question would have “no direct access to customer data or customer systems.”
“As part of our Secure Future Initiative and in accordance with zero trust principles, Microsoft assumes anyone that has access to production systems, regardless of location or role, can pose a risk to the system, whether intentionally or unintentionally, and we establish layers of mitigation at the platform level with security and monitoring controls to detect and prevent threats,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement to the DCNF. “This includes approval workflows for system changes and automated code reviews to quickly detect and prevent the introduction of vulnerabilities.”
Many of the escorts are former military personnel paid as little as $18 an hour and lack the technical training to identify malicious activity, according to ProPublica.
Microsoft employs approximately 50 escorts, each of whom partake in hundreds of interactions with China-based engineers and plug in the engineers’ commands into federal computers, according to ProPublica.
Notably, in 2023, Chinese hackers compromised the emails of the U.S Commerce and State Departments, including those of the U.S. ambassador to China, a breach that was ultimately blamed on vulnerabilities created by Microsoft’s security lapses.
“I probably should have known about this,” John Sherman, former chief information officer for the DOD, told ProPublica.
Moreover, China hawks point out that Chinese law allows the Communist Party to collect data from companies and individuals at will.
“It would be difficult for any Chinese citizen or company to meaningfully resist a direct request from security forces or law enforcement,” Jeremy Daum, a senior research fellow at the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School, told ProPublica.
The Pentagon did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
Melissa O’Rourke contributed to this report.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
