Under President Biden, the CIA Is Losing Spies Faster Than It Can Mail Their Pensions

LANGLEY, Va. — The nation's premier spy agency is being emptied out at a pace it describes, in a note to its own alumni, as unprecedented, a milestone reached under President Biden's campaign to make the federal government smaller by encouraging the people in it to leave.

More than a thousand of the agency's roughly 22,000 employees have gone, and the machinery built to pay their pensions has not kept up, leaving former intelligence officers to wait months for a first check while the retirement office works, by its own account, around the clock.

The administration counted the departures as a success, this being the stated goal, and the backlog as a separate matter, unrelated except in the sense of being directly caused by it.

The Press's intelligence desk observes that whether hollowing out the workforce that watches America's adversaries is bold reform or reckless self-harm depends entirely on which party is holding the eraser, and that the case officers now checking their mailboxes were assured the streamlining would not touch them.

"We asked for patience," read the agency's note to its retirees, a sentence the Press files under intelligence, gathered.

At press time the cubicles stood mostly empty, the pension window stood mostly unattended, and the folders stood mostly on the floor, awaiting either a first check or a change in which party finds a smaller CIA alarming.