The News
Security experts and analysts are increasingly concerned that the US government is becoming more vulnerable to espionage and security breaches as a result of President Donald Trump’s war on the bureaucracy and foreign policy approach.
Heightened collaboration between China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea poses a growing threat to US interests, a new intelligence report warned.
The stunning leak of American military plans in a Signal group chat could exacerbate the problem: A Republican congressman said he had “no doubt” Russia and China were monitoring at least some of the devices belonging to top Trump officials in the chat, while a Democratic senator said the “erosion of trust” among US intelligence officials could embolden China to recruit those who have “been pushed out.”
SIGNALS
US adversaries could exploit mass government layoffs
The Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency’s efforts to lay off thousands of federal workers offer US adversaries the chance to recruit disgruntled employees as informants: America’s enemies “pray for this level of chaos, confusion and opportunity,” journalist Noah Shachtman wrote. Hostile recruitment is not new, a former counterintelligence official said, but DOGE “is taking it to a whole new level.” Reuters reported that a secretive network of Chinese firms has tried to lure recently laid-off US government employees, while China and Russia are using LinkedIn and other job sites to hunt for the “Social Service guy who’s really upset about what DOGE is doing,” a former FBI officer said. DOGE is a “counterintelligence disaster in the making,” one analyst said.
Russia remains a threat to US interests
Moscow remains an “enduring potential threat to US power,” the latest US government threat assessment found — stressing that the war in Ukraine has offered Russia “a wealth of lessons regarding combat against Western weapons and intelligence.” Donald Trump’s rapprochement with Moscow “has made it more difficult to shape a comprehensive Western response” to Russia’s “systematic and increasingly lethal hybrid warfare strategy,” two analysts argued. The detente has seemingly deterred US officials from investigating Russian threats, FBI agents said, while the Kremlin is hoping to reestablish its Washington diplomatic presence in order to rebuild its fractured spy networks.
Western intelligence-sharing could suffer
The US-Russia rapprochement is a grave concern for Washington’s allies, Foreign Policy wrote, with many worried that “Trump, who has a history of sharing sensitive and classified information, is about to spend time with [...] Kremlin officials, with no other allies in the room.” And the president’s “politicization of the intelligence community” is likely to cause “turmoil and paralysis among American spies that spill over onto allies,” The Economist argued. Meanwhile,the fallout from the Signal leak “could create dangerous blind spots in detecting threats,” a former congressional intelligence advisor said. The Five Eyes intelligence sharing network may be particularly vulnerable, one former British intelligence official noted, as it “has, in practice, just one unwritten rule – that America makes the rules.”