How Trump’s government-cutting moves risk exposing the CIA’s secrets

The CIA is conducting a formal review to assess the potential damage caused by an unclassified email sent to the White House in early February identifying some officers by first name and last initial, a source familiar with the matter told CNN.

The CIA is conducting a formal review to assess any potential damage from an unclassified email sent to the White House in early February that identified for possible layoffs some officers by first name and last initial and could’ve exposed the roles of people working undercover, a source familiar with the matter told CNN. That’s just one of multiple aftershocks from President Donald Trump’s push to take a jackhammer to the federal government – including the CIA. The administration’s efforts to cut the workforce and audit spending at the CIA and elsewhere threaten to jeopardize some of the government’s most sensitive work, current and former US officials familiar with internal deliberations say. Across the river in Washington, a senior career Treasury Department official delivered a memo warning Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that granting a 25-year-old computer engineer with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency access to the government’s ultra-sensitive payments system risked exposing highly classified CIA payments that flow through it. And on the CIA’s 7th floor — home to top leadership — some officers are also quietly discussing how mass firings and the buyouts already offered to staff risk creating a group of disgruntled former employees who might be motivated to take what they know to a foreign intelligence service. Taken together, those actions highlight the depth of unease among career officials that Trump’s efforts to speedily slim down the US government may be putting American secrets within the grasp of foreign spies and hackers. In an effort to comply with an executive order to downsize the federal workforce, the CIA earlier this month sent the White House an extraordinarily unusual email listing all new hires that have been with the agency for two years or less — a list that included CIA officers who were preparing to operate under cover — over an unclassified email server.