By Erin Banco and Jonathan Landay
NEW YORK/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Central Intelligence Agency has fired a slew of recent hires this week, two people familiar with the matter said, as U.S President Donald Trump’s administration works to shrink and streamline the federal workforce.
The recent hires, known as probationary employees, worked across a number of different portfolios and were fired because of performance issues, a person familiar with the matter said.
“At CIA, we are reviewing personnel within their first two years of service at the Agency,” a CIA spokesperson said in a statement. “For some personnel, that process will result in termination. Our officers face unique pressures from working in situations that are fast-paced and high-stakes. It’s not for everyone.”
In some other agencies, federal workers who were fired for alleged poor performance as part of Trump’s remaking of the federal government received excellent performance reviews before they were fired, according to interviews and documents seen by Reuters.
It is unclear how many probationary employees – those hired in the last four years – have been dismissed. Those who were fired had only been working for the agency for two years or less, the sources said.
Any large-scale firing of CIA officers, even probationary, could have an impact on the agency’s intelligence collection and analysis efforts.
The firings come as the Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk, works to slash funding across the government. Thousands of probationary employees in various agencies have been fired in recent weeks.
Last month the CIA, at the direction of the White House, reviewed its ranks and sent an email back to the Office of Personnel Management with a list of probationary employees. The list included first initials and last names.
That unclassified email alarmed lawmakers on Capitol Hill and others inside the agency who worried that the identities of those employees would be leaked or obtained by foreign adversaries, risking their safety.
“Exposing the identities of officials who do extremely sensitive work would put a direct target on their backs for China,” Senator Mark Warner wrote on X at the time.
The firings of the probationary employees at the CIA started earlier this week after a federal judge in the Eastern District of Virginia ruled on a lawsuit involving officers who had been temporarily assigned to diversity initiatives in the Biden administration. The ruling allowed the CIA to fire employees at will.
Another person familiar with the matter said members of the House and Senate intelligence committees were not informed that the dismissals had begun and that members would be seeking more information from the agency in the coming days.
(Reporting by Erin Banco and Jonathan Landay; Editing by Don Durfee and Chizu Nomiyama)
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