Similar to the offer given to the rest of the government workers, CIA employees are being offered eight months of pay and benefits as long as they resign from their jobs. The buyout offer has been relatively successful for government workers in general, as roughly 40,000 people have accepted the offer and resigned as of February 5.
According to CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s office, the agency has also implemented a temporary freeze on hiring CIA applicants who had already been given conditional employment offers.
The attempt to clear out bureaucrats is reportedly part of an effort to purge federal employees who are anti-Trump, as there are serious concerns that these bureaucrats would work behind the scenes to hinder President Donald Trump’s agenda, which the American people voted for.
Trump reportedly plans to restructure the CIA to focus on issues like trade wars, undermining communist China, and eliminating the Mexican drug cartels, which Trump has declared to be terrorist organizations.
Reports indicate that Ratcliffe pushed for the Trump administration to allow the CIA to offer these buyouts, as he thinks that they would be a great first step in his plan to create “a more aggressive spy agency.”
He has been speaking out about threats that the CIA should be focusing on for some time now, even declaring during his confirmation hearing in January that the United States’ current threat environment was “the most challenging” in history.
“The Chinese Communist Party remains committed to dominating the world economically, technologically, and militarily,” Ratcliffe told the Senate Intelligence Committee. “Transnational criminal organizations are flooding American communities with violence and deadly narcotics.”
“The Russia-Ukraine War wages on, spreading devastation and increasing the risk of the United States being pulled into conflict with a nuclear power,” he added. “The Iranian regime and its terrorist proxies continue to export mayhem across the Middle East, and Iran is closer to nuclear breakout than ever before.”
“North Korea remains a destabilizing force,” Ratcliffe argued. “Increasing coordination among America’s rivals and adversaries threatens to compound the threats they each pose individually. And numerous terrorist groups and other non-state actors – some of which have even crossed our southern border – still pose a persistent threat to our people and our homeland.”
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