Federal Layoffs Create Breeding Ground For Spies

When one becomes a federal employee, at any level in any agency or department, one takes an oath that they will a) uphold and defend the Constitution, and b) not share any classified information even after leaving federal employment. In a normal year, roughly 100,000 people retire, die, or otherwise leave their federal jobs. This year, in the past two months alone, the number is more than five times that amount and still increasing. As a result, Russian and Chinese agents are giddy over the number of potential prospects that have been released into the wild.

From the beginning, understand that at this point no one fired due to recent layoffs has been arrested or investigated for any form of espionage or releasing classified information. The closest anyone has come is Johnathan Buma, who claimed in 2023 that the FBI went after President Joe Biden’s son Hunter while stifling his own investigation of President Donald Trump’s ally Rudy Giuliani, was arrested Monday evening at Kennedy Airport in New York as he was about to board a flight out of the country, authorities said. Burma considers himself a whistleblower, however. His book was in process well before the current rounds of layoffs. The FBI says that the book contains ‘classified’ information and Buma was arrested last week.

On the whole, the US has been rather fortunate in the lack of spies found among the large number of people it employs. Over the years, the few that have been caught have been in agencies where spies are traditionally heavily recruited: the FBI and CIA. Typically, those matters are handled quietly, rarely reaching the press as it would be embarrassing for either agency if we knew how many spies were in the mix.

Now, however, the White House has, inadvertently we assume, created a perfect storm that has spy recruiters’ mouths watering. Not only are there 500,000+ people wandering around looking for employment, but the nature of the cuts coming through DOGE (which still isn’t a legal federal entity) gives those employees an axe to grind against both DOGE and the White House. Various message boards are full of complaints, worries, and messages of anger. China and Russia are both watching with glee.

Employees leaving federal agencies may not know where bodies are buried, but they do have a working knowledge of how those agencies operate, weaknesses within the systems, existing problems that might be exploited, names of decision-makers, and a knowledge of internal security protocols. Departments that have never had reason to worry about spies before should now be concerned.

“This information is highly valuable, and it shouldn’t be surprising that Russia and China and other organizations — criminal syndicates for instance — would be aggressively recruiting government employees,” said Theresa Payton, a former White House chief information officer under President George W. Bush, who now runs her own cybersecurity firm.

Wait, criminals are in on this, too? Yes. Think about it for a moment. Former federal employees might know of pending contracts about to be awarded, mergers and acquisitions soon to be approved, which companies the government is considering sanctioning, and which foreign countries could be next on the tariff hit list. All kinds of information could be valuable for extortion and racketeering enterprises around the world.

Don’t think that only senior employees have had access to critical information, either. A Pentagon data analyst who spent their entire career in a little room with no windows might know of databases that analyze military capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses. An administrative assistant at the Department of Energy, which oversees nuclear secrets, might have the name of a clandestine facility no one knows about. One doesn’t have to be a big muckity-muck to profit from sharing information.

As these now-former employees of the government start posting resumes and looking for new jobs, they inadvertently make themselves easy targets. All a recruiter has to do is run a search on a targeted agency and see how many resumes pop up. The resumes themselves are a treasure trove of information as they typically include contact information such as home addresses and personal phone numbers. Those bullet points that list achievements and skills become the selling point that allows recruiters to pick out those most likely to possess critical information.

“This happens even in good times — someone in the intelligence community who for personal financial or other reasons walks into an embassy to sell America out — but DOGE is taking it to a whole new level,” said John Schindler, a former counterintelligence official. “Someone is going to go rogue. It’s just a question of how bad it will be.”

Frank Montoya Jr., a retired senior FBI official and former top U.S. government counterintelligence executive, told the Associated Press that lower-level employees are more likely to sell out than those in the intelligence agencies. “When it comes to the theft of intellectual property, when it comes to the theft of sensitive technology, when it comes to access to power grids or to financial systems, an IRS guy or a Social Service guy who’s really upset about what DOGE is doing, they actually are the bigger risk,” Montoya said.

“We have seen over the last generation, the last 20–25 years, the Chinese and the Russians increasingly have been targeting non-national defense and non-classified information, because it helps them modernize their military, it helps them modernize their infrastructure,” he added.

What may be most critical at this moment is that employees who previously might have been quick to raise a red flag about any apparent misuse or wrongful dissemination of sensitive information could likely have lost the motivation to do so. Messages abounding across the Internet describe a level of anger at DOGE and the White House that could lead to danger. The fact that most message boards allow users to post anonymously can make identifying those who could be the biggest threat almost impossible.

This is a problem that the administration has created itself. This is an opportunity that foreign recruiters would be negligent to ignore. What we have as a result is a situation where the entire national infrastructure could be brought to its knees because Mary from Accounting has a lot of medical bills to pay and can’t find a new job.

American’s risk factor has never been higher and the spies could be your next-door neighbors.