I’m a 3X CIA Recruit. Trump’s Purge is a National Security Disaster.

I’ve been known for a few things in my life, but there’s one thing I haven’t publicly revealed until now: I’m a former three-time recruit for the CIA’s clandestine service. 
 
Between building a career in politics and earning two master’s degrees in intelligence-related fields, I’ve also spent months of my life willingly committing to the difficult hiring process of becoming a spy. 
 
Because if there is one thing that I’ve learned from my time with the CIA recruitment process, it’s that it’s not an easy job – an obvious but true statement. The hiring and training process involves years of language, tradecraft, and cultural training to develop the necessary expertise. You can’t just replace a trained CIA workforce by hiring new spies on LinkedIn.
 
Which means that I can say with certainty, that the Trump Administration’s so-called “buyout” offer to the entire CIA workforce is a five-alarm fire. And thanks to his vindictiveness against the intelligence community, we are very likely walking straight into the next Pearl Harbor or 9/11. 
 
The CIA isn’t a Silicon Valley start-up, no matter what Elon Musk and his twenty-something DOGE flunkies might say. Losing any level of this expertise would be incredibly damaging for the safety of our country. 
 
Not only would it be a loss of analysts, field operatives and cyber experts needed to help us identify the next terrorist threat, but it would also create vulnerabilities to be exploited by our foreign adversaries.
 
China, Russia and Iran aren’t just watching, they’re waiting – and a weakened CIA is their green light to act. 
 
The CIA’s mission has always been about objective national security. CIA officers collect and analyze information to be presented to policymakers for policy decisions. A mass purge of current officers and reshaping the agency in Trump’s image, means that future leaders might also expect the agency to be loyal to them, and not to the agency or the Constitution. 
 
By gutting the CIA, it puts the Agency on the pathway towards becoming an authoritarian tool, where future presidents could very well install hand-picked intelligence officers who only tell them what they want to hear, with any voices of dissent would get silenced in the process. 
 
This not only makes intelligence useless, but it also puts us on a sliding slope towards the agency becoming a tool for state propaganda, oblivious to the real dangers that potentially exist. 
 
And while it’s likely that the men and women of the Agency, patriots and dedicated public servants, will ultimately refuse the so-called buyout (as many of their other federal colleagues have also done), there’s no guarantee they’ll be able to stay in their roles.
 
Newly confirmed CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s very decision to opt the agency into the buyout offer, along with the hiring freeze and rescinded jobs already happening in-agency, or even the lateral ongoing chaos at agencies like USAID, all point to the fact that we can’t guarantee the agency’s workforce will remain untouched.
 
We’ve already seen what happened in the post-Cold War era under President Bill Clinton, when budgets were cut, and human intelligence officers were replaced with signals intelligence. Eight years later, it directly led to 9/11 and became the worst terrorist attack in history to happen on our shores. 
 
What will happen this time? 
 
Will China launch an attack on Taiwan? Or will we face domestic attack from a to-be-determined foreign adversary? We don’t know yet. But losing critical parts of the CIA workforce will absolutely open the door to future intelligence failures and make it harder for us to see them coming. 

While examples of this have fortunately been rare in our intelligence history, creating a mass exodus of angry, disenfranchised officers, may also open the door to recruitment attempts by foreign adversaries.  
 
Some of the most damaging security breaches in our history, like Aldrich Ames or Robert Hanssen, were the direct result of them feeling undervalued by their own government and in dire need of financial opportunities – leaving them vulnerable to foreign exploitation.
 
What Trump and Ratcliffe are doing today will weaken our national security for a generation, of not more – and history shows us exactly where this road will lead. 
 
It’s one that none of us want.