There is perhaps no clandestine institution on Earth more storied than the CIA, but over the past three weeks, the agency’s goals have shifted significantly as President Donald Trump continues his unprecedented efforts to reshape the federal government. Less than a month into the Trump administration, the Central Intelligence Agency finds itself in the president’s rapidly changing crosshairs, joining the many federal programs that have offered employees legally dubious buyout offers. As Trump, who has long railed against a supposed “deep state” of nebulous law enforcement and national security interests, casts his attention toward the CIA, experts are left to wonder what the world’s premier spy enterprise might look like should the president realize his vision.
Infusing the agency with ‘renewed energy’
The buyout offers are a “signal to those who oppose Trump’s agenda to find work elsewhere,” said The Wall Street Journal. The goal is to “bring the agency in line with President Trump’s priorities, including targeting drug cartels,” and to have a workforce suited to the agency’s “new goals, which also include Trump’s trade war and undermining China.” More broadly, Trump’s vision for the agency is to have a “greater focus on the Western Hemisphere.”
The buyouts and renewed focus on CIA priorities are part of a “holistic strategy to infuse the Agency with renewed energy,” a CIA spokesperson said to CBS News. The goal is to “provide opportunities for rising leaders to emerge, and better position the CIA to deliver on its mission.” The decision to include the CIA in Trump’s broader federal buyout initiative appears to have come from newly installed Director John Ratcliffe — a longtime Trump loyalist — who “personally decided he also wanted the CIA to be involved,” CNN said. However, one source said to CNN, the effort may be “far less sweeping” than for agencies “not considered to be doing national security work.” For instance, “some employees,” such as those “handling high-priority tasks,” would “not be eligible for the offer,” said NBC News.
‘Radical, unplanned, and self-contradictory’
The CIA’s overarching mission of protecting U.S. interests, “requires depth of thought, strategy, and long-term planning,” said The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Trump’s plan to remake the agency exhibits “none of those qualities,” and is instead “reactive, poorly designed, and likely to achieve the opposite of its stated goal.” Already there is “panic within the broader national security community,” said NPR. Experts are worrying about the possibility that “years of experience, talent and secrets could soon be heading out the door.” It’s still unclear whether other intelligence agencies would “follow suit with a buyout offer,” said The Wall Street Journal.
Crucially, none of the Trump administration’s planned reforms “freeze the actual new and emerging threats” eager to “pounce on any perception of polarization or additional vulnerabilities,” said the Robert Lansing Institute for Global Threats and Democratic Studies. It is “entirely possible,” then, that a host of American adversaries “stand to benefit the most” from a pivot from “reasonable, dedicated, thoughtful, and necessary reform and review toward a radical, unplanned, and self-contradictory near-elimination of the intelligence agencies in their conventional sense.”