Image Credit: “Federal Workers are Patriots.” Geoff Livingston. CC-BY 2.0.
Mass Federal Layoffs Open New Espionage Opportunities for China
Since January 2025, President Donald J. Trump has disseminated multiple executive orders to cut federal workforce and spending through “Reductions in Force” led by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). On June 6, 2025, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that federal government employment is down by 59,000 since January—a 22,000 decline in May alone.
The Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) assessed with “high confidence” in March that foreign adversaries in China and Russia are trying to “capitalize” on the Trump administration’s mass layoffs. Foreign intelligence entities are pursuing outgoing federal employees with security clearances to obtain critical infrastructure and government bureaucracy information. China is now targeting newly unemployed federal workers for the recruitment of deliberate and unwitting espionage against the United States.
Chinese espionage recruitment is not a new threat to the U.S. government. China sponsors talent recruitment programs in the academic and private sectors that incentivize the theft of American technology, intellectual property, trade secrets, and pre-publication material in exchange for financial, personal, and professional gains. From 2000-2023, there were 224 cases of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) related espionage; the U.S. observed over 60 cases from 2021-2025 alone. About 80% of espionage prosecutions since 2018 have benefited the CCP.
Given the limited opportunities in America’s current job market and ongoing federal hiring freeze, CCP intelligence agents could successfully recruit former government officials for work that inadvertently supports the CCP agenda. Last month, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) published a study on Chinese intelligence operations targeting laid-off federal workers. The investigative team located an advertisement on a Washington, DC job board titled “Job Opportunities for Recently Laid-Off U.S. Government Employees.” The post was linked to a consulting firm in Singapore, but investigators uncovered a “broader network of websites, LinkedIn pages, and job advertisements that appeared to be a Chinese intelligence operation.” Four fake companies in the uncovered network of five claimed to be consulting and headhunting firms in the U.S., Singapore, and Japan, but technical features revealed their Chinese origins. A single entity, Smiao Intelligence—a subsidiary of Beijing Simiao Intelligent Information Technology—created the network for intelligence collection purposes.
Historically, money has been the primary motivation for becoming a foreign asset; employee disgruntlement is the second largest motivator. Mass federal layoffs present a unique opportunity for the CCP to exploit both financial desperation and employee disgruntlement. Foreign intelligence officers actively search LinkedIn, TikTok, Reddit, and RedNote, a Chinese social media platform, for posts from disgruntled federal employees. Political resentment is a form of employee disgruntlement that CCP agents exploit. Ron Rockwell Hansen, a former operations officer in the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), spied and sold national defense secrets to China for over five years. Hansen stated in an intercepted phone call that his acts were partially motivated by his hatred for President Trump. From 2013-2018, Hansen received over $800,000 from the CCP in 40 visits to China.
The U.S. has protocols to combat and raise awareness about foreign counterintelligence (CI) threats. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and National Counterintelligence Security Center (NSCS), for example, publicly disseminate information about warning signs, reporting guidelines, and mitigation strategies. U.S. security clearance holders receive training in CI awareness and reporting, in addition to being bound by Standard Form (SF) 312, “Classified Information Nondisclosure Agreement”—a lifetime legal contract with the U.S. government that prohibits unauthorized disclosures of classified national security information.
Despite these measures, the threat of legal repercussion does not always outweigh individual emotional and financial vulnerabilities. China will spare no effort to obtain and leverage critical security, technology, and infrastructure information over the U.S.; ongoing large-scale federal layoffs only increase the risk that these operations will succeed.
“Employees that feel they have been mistreated by an employer have historically been much more likely to disclose sensitive information,” says Holden Triplett, the Director for Counterintelligence at the National Security Council in the first Trump administration. “We may be creating, albeit somewhat unintentionally, the perfect recruitment environment.”
