The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reportedly offered buyouts to its entire workforce on Tuesday in an effort to restructure the agency and confront the top threats facing the U.S.
The Wall Street Journal reported that employees were offered eight months of pay and benefits if they quit their jobs, but overall interest among those who work at the CIA appeared to be low.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s officer said that the agency was also temporarily freezing the hiring of applicants who had been given conditional offers.
The report added that President Donald Trump’s top goals for the agency revolved around trade wars, undermining communist China, and destroying the Mexican drug cartels.
The offers were essentially a signal to those working in the U.S. government that if they oppose Trump, they should leave the agency and work elsewhere.
Ratcliffe reportedly urged the White House to make the offers to the CIA because he believes it is a necessary first step for creating “a more aggressive spy agency.”
In his confirmation hearing last month before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Ratcliffe said that the U.S.’s current threat environment was “the most challenging” in history.
“The Chinese Communist Party remains committed to dominating the world economically, technologically, and militarily,” Ratcliffe said. “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 continued. “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,” he added. “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.”
