Welcome to Spycast, the official podcast of the International Spy Museum. I'm your host, Sasha Ingberg,

and each week I take you into the shadows of espionage, intelligence, and covert operations across the globe.

They were dismissed with startling swiftness and sweeping breath.

We're talking about government employees caught in the midst of the Trump administration's

relentless pursuit to pare down the federal workforce.

The sheer number of fired personnel and the way U.S. officials let them go have led to concerns that

disillusioned former employees may share what they know with foreign intelligence services,

jeopardizing the very security they once sought to protect. I sat down with Bill Evanina,

the former director of counterintelligence, to discuss that

fear and how foreign adversaries are exploiting the moment.

Bill, thank you so much for joining us with thousands of federal employees being let go.

How dangerous of a moment is this?

And is it for the years to come?

I do believe that we are in a position right now where if we don't take care of those employees

and we don't look at this as a long-term issue, it might come back to haunt us.

Tell me about the parts of the government that you think are the most vulnerable right now.

Well, obviously it would be the intelligence community and members of the Defense Department who have access to classified information.

Secondarily, and I think in more numbers, are the employees, the women and men who work

for agencies who aren't in intelligence community, but also have access to critical technologies

and information analytics that the Chinese and the Russians would want. And those employees

work in agencies like Centers for Disease Control, National Institute of Health, National Science

Foundation, U.S. Patent Office, Department of Labor, agencies that we think of as critical phenomenally

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