People seem to not understand that there will be no rebuilding of these decimated institutions. If there are, they will be manned by a skeleton crew of trump loyalists. They don’t care about lost institutional knowledge, or scaling back to current size, they care about capitulating to foreign actors that want to see US influence disappear from the world stage, and rehiring anyone doesn’t help them accomplish that.
I think people overestimate the CIA and their capabilities both individually and as an institution. There’s a lot of rank and file there. It’s not like 90% of the workforce are covert agents or anything.
What do you expect them to do? If you believe that they’re going to get rehired as consultants, who’s gonna hire them, and what for? Their names are in a list somewhere as having already worked for the CIA and they likely don’t have a personal in with the necessary people (like Elon Musk). Do you expect them to use their covert identities? How many people do you think have those? How many of those identities would have relevant experience? Who is going to support those identities, now that the office providing them with believable history and financial details is no longer running? What kind of action do you think they’re gonna take? If not any against the government, then they’re just going to capitulate to doing their job for fascists. If against the government, why did they wait till it got so bad already? I legitimately don’t understand what you think is going to happen.
OK, not only are you completely correct, but the latest TechDirt article shows that the CIA has just blown the identity of all new hires to comply with an executive order.
So long-time staffers might be doing CYA, but the org as a whole is already seriously compromised.
Yeah, but who are those shell companies working for? A big selling point in the general buyouts is, “we want people out of govt service and in the private sector where they can do thier best work!”
I’m thinking we don’t want a bunch of freelance spies contracting to the highest bidder
My first thought was: everyone in the CIA “retires” and gets “consulting” gigs with shell companies nobody has heard of.
People seem to not understand that there will be no rebuilding of these decimated institutions. If there are, they will be manned by a skeleton crew of trump loyalists. They don’t care about lost institutional knowledge, or scaling back to current size, they care about capitulating to foreign actors that want to see US influence disappear from the world stage, and rehiring anyone doesn’t help them accomplish that.
I think you may have missed my point?
I’m pretty sure the CIA is already a few steps ahead of Trump on this one, unlike many of the other Federal institutions who never saw it coming.
Not sure what I missed.
I think people overestimate the CIA and their capabilities both individually and as an institution. There’s a lot of rank and file there. It’s not like 90% of the workforce are covert agents or anything.
What do you expect them to do? If you believe that they’re going to get rehired as consultants, who’s gonna hire them, and what for? Their names are in a list somewhere as having already worked for the CIA and they likely don’t have a personal in with the necessary people (like Elon Musk). Do you expect them to use their covert identities? How many people do you think have those? How many of those identities would have relevant experience? Who is going to support those identities, now that the office providing them with believable history and financial details is no longer running? What kind of action do you think they’re gonna take? If not any against the government, then they’re just going to capitulate to doing their job for fascists. If against the government, why did they wait till it got so bad already? I legitimately don’t understand what you think is going to happen.
OK, not only are you completely correct, but the latest TechDirt article shows that the CIA has just blown the identity of all new hires to comply with an executive order.
So long-time staffers might be doing CYA, but the org as a whole is already seriously compromised.
Yeah, but who are those shell companies working for? A big selling point in the general buyouts is, “we want people out of govt service and in the private sector where they can do thier best work!”
I’m thinking we don’t want a bunch of freelance spies contracting to the highest bidder
I think the joke was the shell companies are all owned by the CIA. Hence the quotes around “retires” and “consulting”.
The CIA will just become even sketchier.