Braxton Taylor
The Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence have offered their workforces a “deferred resignation” offer akin to the one recently sent to federal civilian agencies through the Office of Personnel Management, the spy agencies confirmed Wednesday.
The CIA and NSA have also offered their workforce a similar deal. On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported the CIA offer, and similar reports followed about the National Security Agency.
“As directed by OPM and DoD, the deferred resignation program is available to eligible NSA employees,” a spokesperson for the signals intelligence agency said.
The Trump administration, seeking to downsize the federal workforce, has announced that employees who resign by Thursday will remain on the payroll with full benefits until the end of September. [Editor’s note: The agreement also says employees might be called back to work “in rare circumstances”; they also give up the right to redress if the government reneges, according to a Feb. 4 memo from OPM. The memo asserts that the offer is legal; others, including Democratic lawmakers, have raised doubts.]
The offer asks IC workers to decide on the offer by Feb. 6.
It’s not clear how many IC staffers would accept the proposal. [On Tuesday, administration officials told reporters that more than 20,000 feds had taken the offer. That’s about one percent of the total federal workforce, which typically sees about five or six percent attrition each year.]
Around two weeks ago, an email landing in employees’ inboxes from the address [email protected] told recipients that it was a “test of a new distribution and response list” and asked them to reply “YES” to it. Many workers suspected it was a phishing email and reported it to their IT departments.
A second test email went out the following day, and federal employees were later sent a deferred resignation offer using the same system shortly thereafter, saying they would be paid until Sept. 30 — provided they resign by Feb. 6. It wasn’t clear at the time whether that type of offering would be made available to the intelligence community.
President Donald Trump has long railed against the intelligence community, accusing it of being weaponized against him, his campaign and his allies.
Democratic lawmakers on the Senate Intelligence Committee rallied against White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles in a Wednesday letter accusing Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency — a cost-cutting unit headed by billionaire Elon Musk — of circumventing classified information protocols with DOGE recently accessing systems inside the Treasury Department, Office of Personnel Management and USAID.
“As you know, information is classified to protect the national security interests of the United States. Government employees and contractors only receive access to such information after they have undergone a rigorous background investigation and demonstrated a ‘need to know.’ Circumventing these requirements creates enormous counterintelligence and security risks,” they wrote.
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