(Bloomberg) -- On March 2, US President Joe Biden’s administration proposed some of the most aggressive measures to fight cyberattacks to date. They would require businesses to beef up their defenses and hold software makers more accountable for security breaches.

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Noticeably missing that day was the architect behind the plan: Chris Inglis, America’s first cyber director. Inglis had stepped down from his post a few weeks before the unveiling.

Inglis didn’t say much publicly at the time about why he had resigned after fewer than two years on the job. He told some that he had accomplished what he set out to do. But, according to five people familiar with his thinking and emailed correspondence, the primary reason was clashes with another senior cybersecurity official, Anne Neuberger, the deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging technology.Inglis’s resignation dissolved what one veteran of the cybersecurity industry dubbed the “dream team,” led by Neuberger, Inglis and Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, known as CISA. With the Biden administration just beginning to implement the cyber strategy, it has yet to nominate a successor to Inglis.

This trio of highly accomplished, former National Security Agency officials were brought together in 2021 just after cyberattacks had forced shut the nation’s largest fuel pipeline, leading to widespread gasoline shortages, and temporarily wiped out one-fifth of US beef capacity. The US was still recovering from an attack by Russian hackers who had infiltrated federal agencies and major technology companies, in part by installing a digital backdoor in popular SolarWinds software.They were meant to work hand-in-hand to defend US agencies and businesses against relentless cyber-espionage and a surge in ransomware attacks against everything from energy infrastructure to hospital systems. But from the start, observers worried that the two White House cyber jobs overlapped and had competing lines of authority, setting the stage for a turf war, according to interviews with more than a dozen people, including current and former White House officials.