The upheaval from the Trump administration, Elon Musk, and DOGE is seismic. It doesn't take a lot to figure that out. While there can be criticisms of that, nothing they've done is worth committing literal acts of treason against the United States. Yet, according to the press, that's exactly what some government employees are considering.

We get this from CNN, which claims that discussions are happening at the top levels of the CIA. According to them, "some officers are also quietly discussing how mass firings and the buyouts already offered to staff risk creating a group of disgruntled former employees who might be motivated to take what they know to a foreign intelligence service."

The countries specifically at issue are China and Russia or anyone with deep enough pockets. The reporting says, "Current and former intelligence officials say that mass firings could offer a rich recruitment opportunity for foreign intelligence services—like China or Russia—who may seek to exploit financially vulnerable or resentful former employees."

CNN and the diplomats in question go on to blast Trump for creating this situation. A source added, "You're just rolling the dice that these folks are gonna honor their secrecy agreement and not volunteer to a hostile intelligence service."

We will learn about the depths of this soon, and not just because of the DOGE cuts. Tulsi Gabbard is firing more than 100 employees in the National Security Agency (NSA) after it was revealed they were abusing internal chat systems for discussions of sex and other things.

What will these employees do? They're all going to be fired for cause for misusing government systems and won't count towards the overall workforce reduction happening across the government. The press implies that these are now possible national security risks simply because the government is enforcing some rules around workplace conduct.

A more straightforward analysis would say that if losing your job immediately makes you betray your own country, maybe you shouldn't be in those levels of national security to begin with. If all it takes is a government paying you off, then a U.S. government paycheck doesn't seem like much of a deterrent for those the CIA, NSA, and other agencies don't view as trustworthy.

Shortly after Trump took office, the Department of Justice announced charges against a senior Federal Reserve adviser. Federal prosecutors say the employee "conspired to steal Federal Reserve trade secrets for the benefit of the People's Republic of China (PRC)."

To hide its payments, the Chinese Communist Party "hired" this guy to a university position in China where he fed them secret data from the Federal Reserve, which included data on Trump's tariffs. China turned around and used this data to manipulate public markets in its favor.

And all it cost China was $450,000 for this guy to betray his country while he was still drawing a government paycheck. The FBI said about the indictments, "The Chinese Communist Party has expanded its economic espionage campaign to target U.S. government financial policies and trade secrets in an effort to undermine the U.S. and become the sole superpower."

The DOGE cuts and Donald Trump firing people isn't the problem. The decision to take Chinese money as a payoff to commit treason is something you can do whenever. Blaming Trump for that is a lame attempt to shift blame where it belongs: people willing to commit treason for a dollar.

If this is actually the problem the CIA, NSA, and other intelligence agencies believe it is, then maybe they should fire up some investigations to track down moles and spies in the federal government. Crying in a corner over people potentially committing treason because they lost their jobs misses the forest for the trees—these agencies are admitting they have a disloyal workforce.

I fully empathize with those who are losing their jobs and fully committed to the country and public service. There's a noble calling in there, and we want those people serving the country. But CNN and other media outlets are missing the bigger story that their own sources suggest exists: employees entertaining treason.

And I don't say treason as an idle word: we're talking about people quite literally selling out their country and committing the statutory definition of treason. That's criminal conduct to the detriment of the United States.

That's the real problem, not Donald Trump firing people. The press needs to do a deep dive into how pervasive that problem is and ask questions to the government itself about what it's doing to stop it.