Spies from China and elsewhere are wooing unwitting current and former federal employees, according to a document from the National Counterintelligence and Security Center released Tuesday amid the Trump administration’s efforts to fire and lay off tens of thousands of employees.
They are “targeting current and former U.S. government (USG) employees for recruitment by posing as consulting firms, corporate headhunters, think tanks, and other entities on social and professional networking sites,” said the document, which also contains seals from the Justice Department and the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency. “Their deceptive online job offers, and other virtual approaches, have become more sophisticated in targeting unwitting individuals with USG backgrounds seeking new employment.”
It reminds workers with security clearances that they must protect classified information even after they leave government service.
Efforts to shrink the size of the government, fueled by the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, have targeted agencies across the federal enterprise, including the Defense Department and core intelligence offices like the CIA and the National Security Agency. The CIA has been given the legal go-ahead to terminate some staff outright.
[The administration has announced plans to cut more than 280,000 federal workers, by one count—and rattled hundreds of thousands more.]
On Tuesday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced a sweeping DOGE-like efficiency effort to cut “wasteful spending, inefficiencies, and bloated bureaucracy” from the U.S. intelligence nexus. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which would be a target for these changes, houses the counterintelligence unit that issued the Chinese recruitment warning.
The notice said that the recruitment efforts often include flattery, urgent requests to respond, and the promise of an expedited timeline to a job offer.
The document noted that a former Navy officer was sentenced to prison last January for sending sensitive military data to a Chinese intelligence officer who launched their online relationship with talk of the stock market.
A researcher uncovered a recruitment campaign in which a network of companies linked to a Chinese tech firm has sought to hire recently laid-off U.S. government employees, Reuters recently reported.
Last month, CNN reported that foreign adversaries, including China and Russia, have accelerated efforts to recruit disgruntled federal workers in national security roles, citing people familiar with U.S. intelligence on the matter.
