CIA Director John Ratcliffe, less than two weeks into his tenure, is undertaking the most significant overhaul of the agency’s workforce in modern history.
On Tuesday, the entire CIA workforce received an email offering the opportunity for a “deferred resignation,” which would allow officers to stop coming into work but receive full pay and benefits until September 30, 2025, the official date of their resignation. They would be allowed to also work in the private sector during that time, potentially giving them two incomes.
The same offer was sent out to 2,000,000 other federal employees last week, but until now had excluded national security agencies. Ratcliffe personally decided he wanted the CIA to participate, according to sources.
Last Thursday, the director emailed the Office of Personnel Management, which has been administering the program, and asked for a process that would enable CIA to email its entire workforce offering the opportunity, while allowing the CIA flexibility to work through the timing of officer departures in critical areas.
Ratcliffe also offered long-tenured officers an early retirement option and halted Entry on Duty (EOD) for those who had been offered a job late in the Biden administration, to review whether their position aligns with the Trump administration’s priorities.
These changes are the most significant in the agency’s modern history, and the largest since former CIA Director John Brennan’s reorganization in 2015.
A CIA spokesperson told Breitbart News, “Director Ratcliffe is moving swiftly to ensure the CIA workforce is responsive to the Administration’s national security priorities. These moves are part of a holistic strategy to infuse the Agency with renewed energy, provide opportunities for rising leaders to emerge, and better position the CIA to deliver on its mission.”
Breitbart News was told before Ratcliffe’s decision that many intelligence community employees were already preparing for a “reduction in force,” or blanket employee cuts at their agencies.
“Many people [are] worried about what’s coming next,” one source said last week.
Ratcliffe, a former Republican Texas congressman and the director of national intelligence during the first Trump administration, previewed his plans to revamp the agency in his confirmation hearing last month.
“As you all are no doubt aware, the CIA has a remarkably low turnover rate among its workforce. This shows the CIA’s success in attracting mission-focused public servants who find deep meaning and value in the unique work they are privileged to do each day,” he said. “But in some cases, it also suggests that complacency is tolerated – and in the worst cases, bad actors are not weeded out.
“High performers hate nothing more than mediocrity, and nothing poisons a high-performance workplace culture more than leaders who don’t hold team members accountable when they do not meet expectations,” Ratcliffe added. “The CIA must be a place that incentivizes and rewards meaningful contributions to our nation’s security and holds accountable low performers and bad actors who are not focused on our mission.”
He said he would also develop pathways for mid-career professionals with highly sought-after skills to fill gaps in the Agency’s workforce, and for CIA officers to do rotations in the private sector that broaden their perspective.
“It has been said that the CIA’s World War II predecessor, the OSS, described its ideal recruit as ‘a Ph.D. who could win a bar fight.’ This sentiment is the essence of what today’s CIA must recapture,” Ratcliffe said. “But we must find that fighting spirit in recruits whose talents, skill sets, and backgrounds are more varied than ever.”
He also recently told Breitbart News’s Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle that China is a top priority, but that the foreign policy and intelligence establishments have been behind the times in understanding the threats China poses to the United States, in part because they are built for fighting a cold war with Russia.
“You have people who have been at the different intelligence agencies for so long and focused on the Russia threat — and, as you said, legitimately because [Vladimir] Putin is a bad guy and a regime with a huge nuclear stockpile that we need to talk about — but yeah, the intelligence community has been slow to adjust to the fact that China is the primary geopolitical threat we face,” Ratcliffe said.
“It’s the second largest economy, and they compete with us across the board on a peer-to-peer basis in a way that Russia can’t, and I think there are reasons for that that are unfortunately — there’s a financial aspect to that. From Washington, DC, to Wall Street to Silicon Valley to Hollywood, there has been a desire to keep China from being labeled a bad guy because a lot of people make a lot of money from China and in China, and China has a lot of influence in all of those places,” he said.
“But our intelligence is clear —I saw that as DNI and now it’s inescapable for people to not see — on how sinister and nefarious the People’s Republic of China and its various arms of the Chinese Communist Party have been. So, we’ve been slow to adjust the focus, and it’s one of the things that the president needs and wants from us.”
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