The Central Intelligence Agency offered buyouts to its entire workforce on Tuesday, citing an aim to bring the agency in line with Donald Trump’s priorities, the Wall Street Journal and CNN have reported.
The US spy agency is also freezing the hiring of job applicants already given a conditional offer, the WSJ reported, quoting an aide to CIA director John Ratcliffe.
The aide, not named in the report, said some of those frozen offers were likely to be rescinded if the applicants did not have the right background for the agency’s new goals, which include targeting drug cartels, Trump’s trade war and undermining China.
An unnamed CIA spokesperson told CNN the decision was part of Ratcliffe’s efforts to “ensure the CIA workforce is responsive to the administration’s national security priorities,” and that it is “part of a holistic strategy to infuse the agency with renewed energy”.
It is unclear who will be allowed to take up the offer, another unnamed source familiar with the matter told CNN, but some specific operations or areas of expertise may be restricted.
The agency does not disclose its budget or the number of people it employs. It did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The report of buyout offers is in line with a massive makeover of the US government embarked on by the Trump administration, which has fired and sidelined hundreds of civil servants in first steps toward downsizing the bureaucracy and installing more loyalists.
The White House last week offered two million civilian full-time federal workers an opportunity to stop working this week and receive pay and benefits through 30 September as Trump seeks to slash the size of the government.
Including the CIA in that program seems to have been a recent decision, CNN reported, citing a source who said officials had recently been trying to determine whether they would be included in the programme.
Earlier on Tuesday, unions representing US government employees filed a lawsuit to block the Trump administration’s plan to offer buyouts to federal workers.
Ratcliffe, a former member of the House of Representatives who served as director of national intelligence during Trump’s first term, was confirmed by the US Senate as director of the CIA days after Trump took office for his second term.
His aide said Trump’s CIA will have a greater focus on the western hemisphere, targeting countries not traditionally considered adversaries of the US, according to the Journal.
The US government is the nation’s largest workforce with more than 2.4 million employees, not including post office workers. Project 2025, the conservative manifesto that has guided much of Trump’s policy goals, calls for mass firings of federal workers and suggests replacing many of them with political appointees.
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