CIA Cuts Contractors

The CIA has decided to cut its contractor workforce by 10 percent, the Washington Post reports today. The agency also has implemented a rule barring employees from going to work for contractors serving the CIA within 18 months of leaving the agency. "Over the past three years or so, a fairly significant number of those individuals who resigned -- not retired, but resigned -- from CIA end up coming back as contractors within a short period of time," said CIA Associate Deputy Director Michael Morell. "We want to decrease the number of people who do that."

Apparently, with all the hiring the agency's been doing lately, the CIA figures it can get more of its work done in-house. This represents a pretty big shift from the agency's post-9/11 thinking. As recently as May 2005, Shane Harris was writing the following in Government Executive about the CIA's then-burgeoning efforts to outsource intelligence collection and analysis:

John Negroponte, the new director of national intelligence, might end up presiding over a network of official agencies and outside analysts. A former CIA analyst and manager says the need to do so couldn't be more pressing. He notes that President Bush has ordered a 50 percent increase in the CIA's analyst workforce as soon as possible. "The only way to do that," he says, "is to outsource."

Update: My colleague Anne Laurent reminds me that I foolishly overlooked Shane Harris' much more recent look at contractors and the CIA's human capital crisis, from the May 1, 2007 issue of the magazine. Key quote from that piece:

In the nearly six years since Sept. 11, the CIA and other agencies haven't wanted for applicants; there are more people who want jobs than there are billets. But training employees takes years. To fill the gap in the meantime, during wartime, the agencies have hired contractors in record numbers. The agencies have outsourced some of the most sensitive functions, including analysis, spying on foreign adversaries, prisoner interrogation and translation services.

The outsourcing could be temporary, assuming intelligence agencies eventually replenish their personnel stocks. Except that the agencies actually are competing with the contractors for workers. According to the five-year strategic human capital plan at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, "those same contractors recruit our employees, already cleared and trained at government expense, and then 'lease' them back to us at considerably greater expense."