HUD officially elevates former EV engineer David Julian to CIO

The Department of Housing and Urban Development officially has a new chief information officer — a familiar face with an exceptionally similar background to his predecessor.

David Julian, who has served as HUD’s assistant CIO since July 2025, wrote in a LinkedIn post last month that he had taken over as the agency’s top IT official. HUD did not respond to multiple requests for comment at the time, but an update to the agency’s website this week confirmed the news. 

Julian replaces Eric Sidle, who left HUD in July to become the Interior Department’s CIO. Like Sidle, Julian worked for several years in the electric vehicle industry — at the same two companies. He was a senior staff autonomy program manager for the EV maker NIO from 2018 to 2019, according to his LinkedIn profile, before spending the next three-plus years in various engineering roles at Chargepoint, an EV charging network and hardware provider.   

Prior to his move into the EV world, Julian spent a decade at Apple, where he was head of data pipeline operations for autonomous systems, per his bio. He overlapped with Sidle at Apple for about five years. The former and current HUD CIOs are also both Raytheon alums, though they didn’t work for the defense contractor at the same time.

Before landing in the private sector, Julian completed two tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan during a six-year stint with the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne), according to his LinkedIn profile, experiences that he said gave him “an early grounding in mission-critical operations under pressure.”

At HUD, Julian will lead an IT shop that has had a decent amount of turnover in the past few years. Before Sidle’s yearlong tenure as CIO, Juan Sargeant led the department on an acting basis following the departure of Sairah Ijaz after a little more than a year in the top spot.

The agency’s Office of the Chief Information Officer faced an $18 million cut in the president’s 2026 budget, down to $365 million. Language in the 2026 IT fund appropriations did permit the office to use prior-year unobligated balances to support “activities consistent with this Administration’s priorities.” 

“The goal of this flexibility is to prioritize IT resources for enterprise initiatives aimed at increasing efficiency, supporting HUD’s new program delivery model, and improving customer service,” the document said.