The article said the responsibilities had been transferred to a DoD entity and tried to imply that having the DoD involved in White House operations is somehow bad.

Yea that's a re-org. That's how you fire someone in government because it's so convoluted to outright terminate people.

[Note] since I posted this, the original article link was updated from an Ars Technica link to an Axios article with even _less_ analysis. This is kind of absurd.

If you were running the show, how would you get rid of those people? Regulations make it slow and expensive to get rid of horrible employees. These people could be actively hostile and thus a security risk, which wouldn't be surprising if they were hired by political opponents.

Options are limited. One idea would be to relocate their offices to central Alaska. Another idea is rotating shift work.

If this were normal at-will employment, then they would quickly be replaced.