By Xinhua
Washington : The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has decided to trim its contractor staffing by 10 percent, under pressure from Congress, The Washington Post reported Monday.
This is the agency's first effort since the 9/11 attacks to curb what critics have decried as the growing privatisation of U.S. intelligence work, the report said.
Contractors currently make up about one-third of the CIA workforce, but CIA Director Michael V. Hayden has said that their work has not been efficiently managed.
Associate Deputy Director Michael Morell told the newspaper that reviews are underway "to identify which of our jobs here at CIA should be done by staff and which of our jobs should be done by contractors or a 'mix' of contractors and staff".
Effective June 1, the agency also began to bar contracting firms from hiring former CIA employees and then offering the employees' services to the CIA within the first year and a half of their retirement from the agency — a practice known as "bidding back".
Former employees run many companies providing contract employees to CIA and Pentagon intelligence agencies. One such firm, Abraxas, is run by a former agency case officer, and over the past six years has provided more than 100 former intelligence employees to the intelligence community.
The CIA and many other intelligence agencies were downsized and given personnel limits during the 1990s, so they turned to contractors for staffing surges after the September 11 attacks. For example, the newest Pentagon intelligence agency, the Counter-intelligence Field Activity (CIFA), was established in February 2002 to coordinate Defence Department counter-terrorism and counter-intelligence activities. Last year, CIFA was staffed up to 70 percent by contractors.
In its report on the fiscal 2008 intelligence authorization bill, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence last week noted that full-time personnel in the intelligence community had increased by 20 percent since Sept. 11.
The committee questioned the additional costs involved in using contractors, citing an estimate that a government civilian employee costs on average US$126,500 a year, while the annual cost of a "fully loaded" core contractor, including overheads, is 250,000 dollars.
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