CIA reportedly offers buyouts to entire workforce in latest Trump-era purge
CIA reportedly offers buyouts to entire workforce in latest Trump-era purge
The Central Intelligence Agency offered buyouts on Tuesday, citing aim to bring agency in line with Trump priorities, US media report
Summary
The CIA has reportedly offered buyouts to its entire workforce as part of efforts to align with Trump’s national security priorities.
The agency is also freezing conditional job offers, potentially rescinding those not fitting its new focus on drug cartels, Trump’s trade war, and countering China.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s office says the move is part of a broader strategy to reshape the agency.
This follows Trump’s wider government downsizing plan, which includes mass federal buyouts and aligns with Project 2025’s goal of replacing workers with political appointees.
Nothing could possibly go wrong by putting thousands of disaffected spies into your civilian work force...
Better fix that by putting a Russian asset in charge of national intelligence.
Surely this would be an absolute intelligence clusterfuck for the US if the entire CIA staff just... left.
Verbiage is confusing, but there's no way 100% are eligible for a buyout.
Even if you combine VSIP and VERA, to fall under "buyout", not every fed is going to be eligible, and definitely not every CIA employee.
But we don't even have a budget, we're still on a CR, there's literally no money allocated for any of this and very few feds are dumb enough to just take Trump's admin at their word.
Each agency can choose what components they deem essential for operation and exclude those staff, so yeah, there’s absolutely a large chunk of the CIA that has been barred from taking the offer.
Current scuttlebutt is this has been less than a 1/10th as effective as Clinton's reduction in force, and isn't even beating normal retirement numbers.
If trump had just done buyouts and VERA from the start thru official channels, he might have gotten close to doing as much harm as neoliberals did 30 years ago to the federal workforce
But no one trusts it after how it started.
Don't need a CIA when you have an FSB.
Weird that they don't do this with the Secret Service
One of the few good things Trump did in his checks notes two weeks in office.