The Trump administration reportedly plans to reduce the workforce at the CIA by about 1,200 people in the coming years, part of a larger set of cuts to the nation’s intelligence services.
The reductions at the CIA will reportedly be made through a combination of existing employees seeking retirement and reduced future hiring, insiders told The Washington Post, avoiding firings.
The agency doesn’t disclose its exact workforce, but such cuts are thought to represent about 5 percent of its total personnel.
Thousands more cuts are expected across the National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and other U.S. spy outfits, according to the paper.
“Director Ratcliffe is moving swiftly to ensure the CIA workforce is responsive to the Administration’s national security priorities,” an agency spokesperson said in response to the Post’s reporting. “These moves are part of a holistic strategy to infuse the Agency with renewed energy, provide opportunities for rising leaders to emerge, and better position CIA to deliver on its mission.”
The reductions are reportedly unrelated to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative, which has pushed to lay off thousands of federal workers elsewhere.
The administration previously tried to fire 19 intelligence officers who worked on diversity, equality, inclusion and accessibility programs, but a federal judge blocked the attempt in March.
The reported shake-ups in the intelligence community come at a complicated moment for U.S. espionage.
In April, the National Counterintelligence Security Center warned that foreign intelligence agencies, particularly those of China, were actively targeting disaffected current and former government employees, a growing population given the administration’s slash-and-burn strategies to reduce the federal workforce.
Russia is also pursuing such recruitment, CNN reported in February, citing government documents and U.S. intelligence.
These challenges from foreign nations come as the U.S. grows increasingly concerned over Chinese influence, according to a March document obtained by The New York Post.
“No adversary in the history of our Nation has presented a more formidable challenge or a more capable strategic competitor than the Chinese Communist Party (CCP),” CIA Director John Ratclife reportedly wrote in the document. “It is intent on dominating the world economically, militarily, and technologically, and it is aggressively trying to outcompete America in every corner of the globe.”
The administration has had a somewhat adversarial relationship with many of its intelligence-related agencies.
Leaders have reportedly begun using polygraph lie-detector tests at the Department of Homeland Security and Pentagon to ferret out leakers,.
In April, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said she referred two leaking cases to the Department of Justice, accusing individuals of being “deep-state criminals” that “leaked classified information for partisan political purposes to undermine [the president’s] agenda.”
