The Trump administration’s dismantling of the federal government has not come in a single rupture, but through a long, calculated disassembly. While the first term laid rhetorical and procedural groundwork, the second has delivered its full expression. The U.S. Supreme Court has delayed some actions, upheld others, but largely deferred to executive discretion. The firings in early July of 1,300 State Department employees—roughly 9 percent of its workforce—represented the latest wave in that sustained campaign: senior regional experts, arms control lawyers, and public health advisors abruptly dismissed to advance an enduring political strategy.
National security professionals for months have been raising the alarm—not just about operational disruption, but about the deeper degradation of analytic integrity, continuity, and institutional capacity. The primary concern, voiced by both former officials and outside observers, has been about the erosion of the Intelligence Community’s ability to detect threats before they manifest.
Alongside these institutional concerns, several former intelligence and cybersecurity officials have suggested that the scale and manner of the administration’s dismissals will lead to deliberate acts of espionage by disgruntled former public servants. Some have described the situation as a “numbers game,” arguing that a larger pool of displaced personnel inevitably raises the odds that one or more will be recruited by a foreign intelligence service. One former National Security Agency (NSA) counterintelligence officer put it bluntly: “Someone is going to go rogue. It’s just a question of how bad it will be.”
Russia and China are certainly watching. The risk of targeting is real and should not be dismissed. It is the reason national security roles require rigorous vetting, compartmented access, and continuous evaluation. It is why insider threat programs exist, why the FBI aggressively investigates infiltration attempts, and why counterintelligence remains a pillar of national defense.
But here, a distinction must be made. The danger of foreign exploitation is structural, not moral. To acknowledge that laid-off federal employees may be more visible to adversary recruiters is not the same as forecasting that they are more likely to betray the country. Yet that conflation is happening, often implicitly, in press coverage and public commentary.
This actuarial logic—that betrayal scales with volume—rests on flawed assumptions. It misreads how insider threats develop, misattributes motive, and redirects institutional focus away from adversary tradecraft toward internal suspicion. It casts former public servants not as vulnerable targets, but as latent traitors. That shift distorts counterintelligence priorities and risks legitimizing loyalty tests, intrusive surveillance, or retaliatory scrutiny under the guise of prevention. It also reinforces the Trump administration’s framing: that those purged were never trustworthy to begin with.
The real risk is not the presumed disloyalty of those pushed out. It is that the institutions designed to prevent betrayal have been hollowed out. The very systems that detect, deter, and respond to insider threats—continuous evaluation, exit protocols, counterintelligence oversight—are being dismantled without replacement. No surge in vulnerability was accompanied by a surge in protection. No new hotlines. No surge in staffing of cleared counterintelligence personnel.
What matters now is not speculation about who might turn, but recognition of what has already been turned off: the systems meant to detect compromise, manage exits, and sustain institutional memory. The greater threat is not betrayal by individuals—but the dismantling of the structures built to withstand it.The Betrayal Forecast
At the core of warnings that former civil servants will “go rogue” is a simple premise: mass firings increase the pool of disaffected, financially strained, and professionally displaced individuals with knowledge of sensitive government operations. Foreign intelligence services, particularly those of Russia and China, are seen as poised to exploit this moment. Modern espionage no longer depends on walk-ins or chance meetings. Online professional networks, résumé databases, and shell companies have made it easier to identify, contact, and cultivate potential assets under the guise of consulting work or employment outreach. The digital footprint left by newly unemployed officials can become a targeting list for adversary services.
What the Data Reveals
Espionage, unlike insurance claims or workplace attrition, does not follow regular statistical patterns. The available data—and the history of insider betrayal in the United States—tell a different story: one marked by psychological complexity, operational patience, and institutional blind spots, not actuarial inevitability.
The Defense Personnel and Security Research Center, which has tracked insider threats since its establishment after the John A. Walker Jr. espionage case, found that post–Cold War cases of American espionage (1990–2015) were driven primarily by financial motives (28 percent), followed by divided loyalties (22 percent). But these financial drivers often reflected greed, not hardship—many offenders were still employed, with access to sensitive material, when they chose to betray their country. Dismissal or financial desperation following job loss rarely appeared as a primary catalyst.
Between 1990 and 2019, only 1,485 individuals were identified as having committed espionage or related crimes on U.S. soil, despite over four million Americans holding active security clearances during that time. Among those with Top Secret clearances—estimated at 1.3 million—the annual likelihood of betrayal was vanishingly small, amounting to less than one conviction per 100,000 cleared individuals. These are not the statistics of a system prone to mass disloyalty.
Behavioral studies reinforce this picture. Dr. Ursula Wilder, a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) psychologist who interviewed dozens of imprisoned American spies, concluded that betrayal typically arises from a convergence of personality dysfunction, acute personal crisis, and opportunity. Her findings emphasized that espionage is seldom impulsive or situational. It is a cultivated outcome—often the product of long-term targeting, reinforced by ego wounds, unmet needs, or deeply held grievances that go unrecognized and unaddressed over time.
Espionage is not spontaneous combustion. It is a deliberate, cultivated process by hostile intelligence services. As scholars have shown, true insider threats tend to be slow-burning, concealed, and bureaucratically invisible until they are not. When betrayals do occur, they are far more often traced to longstanding institutional blind spots than sudden emotional responses to perceived injustice.
Well-known espionage cases reflect this slow burn. CIA officer Aldrich Ames was not dismissed before he turned as a spy for the Russians—he was promoted. Federal Bureau of Investigation agent Robert Hanssen remained in place working for Russia for years, despite behavioral flags. Defense Intelligence Agency analyst Ana Montes was considered a model employee until the day she was arrested for spying for Cuba. And NSA contractor Edward Snowden left on his own terms. Their betrayals were the end stage of long-running psychological and operational arcs that institutions failed to detect or act upon.
The System Is Being Stripped from Within
Espionage is not an unanticipated risk in U.S. national security—it is a known one. The system was built with that expectation in mind. From background investigations and compartmentalized access to insider threat programs and exit briefings, the federal government has relied on layered controls to reduce both the likelihood and impact of betrayal. These mechanisms were designed not to guarantee loyalty, but to contain the damage one insider could do.
What has made espionage rare is not the absence of grievance, but the presence of structure—rigorous clearance reviews, continuous evaluation of risk, and active counterintelligence efforts to monitor adversary attempts at recruitment. The system is imperfect, but it is built on the assumption that betrayal will happen—and must be detected, contained, and deterred. The danger now is not just that more people may be vulnerable. It is that the architecture that made betrayal manageable is being quietly dismantled.
What once made the system resilient—its layered safeguards—is being dismantled piecemeal under the guise of reform.
At the Department of Justice (DOJ), most of the senior leadership in the National Security Division’s (NSD) had been displaced in March—by dismissal, reassignment, or resignation. Acting division head Devin DeBacker was removed in February. His deputy, veteran counterintelligence prosecutor George Toscas, was also reassigned, alongside Eun Young Choi, Brad Wiegmann, Melissa MacTough, and Scott Damelin. DOJ’s FY 2026 request cuts NSD funding by 8.4% and staff positions by around 10%, eliminating 35 jobs.
At the FBI, a parallel process unfolded. According to former Counterintelligence Director Peter Stork, the Bureau’s internal posture is now “strained,” leaving it “in a greater vulnerability than there was prior to Kash Patel showing up.” There has been a cascading loss of leadership: executive assistant directors pushed out, followed by assistant directors overseeing counterintelligence, counterterrorism, and criminal divisions. Stork warned that, without senior leadership, critical decisions were being made by officials “who have no idea what they’re doing—not due to personal failings, but because they had not been given the time or mentorship to develop the necessary expertise.”
Meanwhile, the capacity of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to monitor insider threats has been weakened. Agencies that once maintained formal exit briefings and post-employment tracking have made these processes inconsistent or, in some cases, abandoned them entirely. Reuters reported in February that multiple personnel with high-level security clearances were dismissed without standard security debriefings—leaving potential intelligence targets in circulation with no formal contact point and diminished institutional ties.
The most direct blow may come from Congress. In June, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Tom Cotton introduced legislation to cap the ODNI at 650 full-time staff—down from 1,800 at the beginning of the year. Director Tulsi Gabbard has already confirmed a 25 percent workforce reduction. Cotton’s bill, if passed into law, would go further, eliminating core institutions such as the National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC) and the National Intelligence University.
As the NCSC underscores in its 2024 strategy, the importance of institutional resilience, proactive detection, and sustained internal vigilance are critical elements of the U.S. counterintelligence posture. To advance these goals, the guidance calls for strengthening insider threat programs, enhancing continuous vetting, and reinforcing the professional capacity of security and intelligence agencies. Yet, the very institutions responsible for implementing this strategy—analytic and oversight bodies, including the NCSC itself—are now being dismantled, degrading the safeguards they were built to maintain.
Conclusion
The United States has never seen a dismantling of its federal institutions at this scale or velocity—least of all in its national security infrastructure. The coordinated dismissal of career professionals, the erosion of oversight mechanisms, and the political recasting of loyalty as ideology are not isolated threats. They are the dismantling of the very structures built to detect and deter betrayal.
This moment carries genuine risk. No prior period offers a direct analogue. We do not know what happens when thousands of professionals—some with sensitive access, others with institutional memory—are cast out under suspicion, stripped of structure, and left without protective scaffolding. The Intelligence Community has faced internal betrayals before. But it has never faced this scale of dislocation, nor this depth of strategic neglect. If new betrayals occur, they will not emerge from nowhere. They will be cultivated—by adversaries, by desperation, or by the very vacuum the government has helped create.
But to leap from that uncertainty to predictions of mass treason is both analytically unsound and politically dangerous. The actuarial logic now gaining traction—suggesting that betrayal is a statistical inevitability tied to volume—is seductive in its simplicity. But it misreads how insider threats emerge and misattributes motive. A betrayal rate of even 1.25 percent would represent an unprecedented counterintelligence collapse—one not supported by historical data, known behavior patterns, or psychological profiles. These projections are not warnings. They are fear instruments masquerading as analysis.
The real risk is not just who might turn—but that we are dismantling the systems that once kept betrayal rare. Continuous vetting, structured oversight, exit protocols, peer networks, professional development—all are being hollowed out. The result is not just vulnerability, but dilution: as purged professionals migrate into the private sector, their skills and access can be redirected in ways national institutions can no longer monitor or guide. This is not classic defection. It is strategic erosion.
That erosion is worsened by the public narrative itself. Painting dismissed officials as latent threats imposes reputational damage, sows mistrust inside agencies, and reframes counterintelligence from protection to punishment. Surveillance becomes deterrence. Whistleblowing becomes risk. And fear becomes policy.
Rebuilding national resilience begins by restoring the capacity we knowingly let degrade. The scale of the purge was visible in advance. Its consequences were predictable. Yet no parallel investment in safeguarding systems accompanied the dismissals. No surge in counterintelligence staff. No reinforcement of analytic triage. In some cases, even basic exit protocols were discarded. That is not a failure of foresight. It is a failure of design.
This is not just a warning against exaggerated fears. It is a call to resist false framing. The betrayal to fear is not from those pushed out, but from a system that let itself be dismantled—and now lacks the institutional confidence to distinguish vulnerability from inevitability. That failure, more than any one act of espionage, is the defining national security risk of this moment.
