The government cuts ordered by the Trump administration have hit the C.I.A.
Some officers hired in the last two years have been summoned to a location away from the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Va., and asked to surrender their credentials to security personnel, according to three people briefed on the firings.
The firings are designed to cull the ranks of newly hired officers, who are also called “probationary employees.”
A spokeswoman for the agency confirmed that some officers hired in the past two years had been fired.
It is not clear how many of the officers will be let go, but people familiar with the effort said that not all recent hires would be dismissed.
The officers were not told why they were being summoned, but amid the firings across the U.S. government, few were in doubt about what was going on.
In fact, some young agency officers working inside Langley have been hesitant to answer their phones, worried that it will be a call from security asking them to report to an off-site location. The firings have devastated morale, and cut productivity this week, according to some of the people briefed on the situation.
A spokeswoman said that the C.I.A. was reviewing personnel who joined the agency within the last two years. The review looks at how new hires handle fast-paced and high-stakes situations. Other officials said the firings were based on performance.
But others said there appeared to be fewer firings in key areas like collecting information on China and Mexican drug cartels.
The firings come just days after a federal judge cleared the way for the C.I.A. director, John Ratcliffe, to fire employees at will. The judge, Anthony J. Trenga of the Eastern District of Virginia, was ruling on a lawsuit brought by officers who had been assigned to diversity and recruiting efforts in the Biden administration.
Judge Trenga said Mr. Ratcliffe had the power to remove any C.I.A. officer for any reason without a right of appeal, rejecting arguments that the officers’ 14th Amendment due process rights or First Amendment speech rights were violated.
After reviewing the judge’s ruling, the C.I.A.’s general counsel office allowed Mr. Ratcliffe to continue to shrink the agency. But Kevin Carroll, a lawyer who has represented fired agency employees, said Judge Trenga had strongly recommended that Mr. Ratcliffe allow the fired employees to appeal their termination.
Those recruiters were some of the agency’s most successful, according to former officials. In 2024, the C.I.A. had its best recruiting effort since the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
But now those recruiters and the officers they brought in are at risk of losing their jobs.
The C.I.A.’s regulations and procedures for dismissing probationary employees are different from those reviewed by Judge Trenga. It is not clear, however, whether the agency has been following those procedures or relying on Mr. Ratcliffe’s broad power to dismiss whomever he wants.
C.I.A. officers are formally on probation for four years. But the Office of Personnel Management has been focused on paring back more recent hires.
More experienced officers who transfer to the C.I.A. from other intelligence agencies also face a lengthy probationary period.
Last month, the C.I.A. sent a list of employees with less than two years experience to the Office of Personnel Management in an unclassified email, complying with White House orders to reduce the number of federal workers.
While the list included only first names and last initials, former officials said that sending it on an unclassified email system created a counterintelligence risk.
Former officials said removing the newly recruited officers would eventually create gaps, hurting efforts to collect information and analyze a broad array of areas.
The first two years of C.I.A. officers’ careers are a time of intense training, and the government spends large amounts of money to teach them spy tradecraft, languages and other skills.
“Literally millions of dollars has been put into some of these probationary employees,” Mr. Carroll said.