Undercover agents may have been compromised in an unclassified White House email about layoffs, setting off alarm bells in the Central Intelligence Agency’s leadership.
Agents were identified by their first name and last initial in the correspondence, CNN reported, which some officials fear may have outed covert Americans in the field and put them in harm’s way.
The agency launched an assessment to determine just how much damage was done by the email, which was sent in early February amid President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s efforts to slash the federal workforce via the Department of Government Efficiency.
DOGE’s breakneck speed in firing tens of thousands workers has officials fearing harsh consequences. U.S. officials told CNN that Musk’s minions may “jeopardize some of the government’s most sensitive work” if the alleged recklessness keeps up.
Perhaps the most chilling of those fears, some in the CIA’s leadership told CNN, is the possibility that a “group” of disgruntled CIA agents swept up in a mass layoff—or pressured into taking a buyout—may take their sensitive knowledge to a foreign intelligence agency.
This threat is why at least one U.S. official is warning that cuts at the intelligence agency need to be handled differently than elsewhere in the federal government.
“Terminating someone who works for Department of Agriculture—even if they’re disgruntled, if they’re not accessing classified information, what’s the risk?” the official told CNN.
That same official warned that CIA firings are a different story: “You take whatever number of employees who are gonna get cut loose and they have knowledge of sensitive programs—that by definition is an insider risk. You’re just rolling the dice that these folks are gonna honor their secrecy agreement and not volunteer to a hostile intelligence service.”
A former CIA officer said this month’s email gaffe not only “burned” agents in the field but also the well-established position—like working covertly as a U.S. Embassy staffer—the agency had long circulated agents in and out of.
“Your predecessor was in that position, as were the five officers before them. Now the host country and adversaries know this person going to this position in the embassy is agency,” an ex-CIA officer told CNN. “They now assume the predecessors were the same [and] work backwards and find out their collective footprint...
“The position is now burned.”
There are also fears DOGE’s infiltration of the Treasury Department and its payments system could expose “highly classified CIA payments that flow through it.”
Concerns about that hypothetical reportedly led a senior Treasury Department official to write a memo to Trump’s treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, urging against giving access to sensitive payment information to a 25-year-old DOGE engineer.
The former DOGE staffer Marko Elez, who left the agency after old social posts were uncovered in which he proudly declared he was a racist “before it was cool,” was closely monitored as he perused the Treasury Department’s records this month. Elez has since been rehired at the Social Security Administration, sources told Bloomberg last week. His name was also listed “on a roster of DOGE employees with a government email address associated with the Executive Office of the President.”
Treasury officials’ protections against Elez, a recent graduate of Rutgers University, included him being limited to using a provided laptop to have “read-only access” to payment systems. His every move was tracked by officials, CNN reported, and he was barred from access to cloud storage, USB ports, and “data exfiltration detection” was installed.
Speculation is mounting in Langley, Virginia, where the CIA is headquartered, that DOGE goons—or Musk himself—may soon show up and demand to be let inside. Whether they will be let in remains to be seen, but the Trump-appointed director of the CIA, John Ratcliffe, has been welcoming to some of Musk’s cuts.
Ratcliffe, a former GOP lawmaker who was on Trump’s impeachment defense team, reportedly requested that Musk’s “fork in the road” buyout offer for civilian workers in the federal government also be extended to those in his spy agency.
