DOGE Danger: U.S. Adversaries Lineup to Recruit Former Government Workers
A Washington think tank uncovered what it says is a Chinese intelligence operation to surreptitiously recruit U.S. government officials who recently left their jobs—just one example of a growing concern.
The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) is a research institute the focuses on U.S. national security and foreign policy issues that formed after the terror attacks of 11 September 2001. In a memorandum published last week, FDD detailed its analysis of efforts by Chinese company Smiao Intelligence to target former federal workers with employment opportunities for fake companies setup by Smiao.
FDD said Smiao created websites for four companies—Dustrategy, RiverMerge Strategies, Tsubasa Insight, and Wavemax Innov—and posted open positions for the fake companies on LinkedIn seeking people with government experience. These fake companies purported to be based in a variety of locations, including Colorado, Singapore, and Japan.
Approximately 134,000 federal workers have been laid off or left their position when offered buyouts, primarily the result of the work of the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). In addition, the administration has announced reduction-in-force plans that would see another 149,000 federal workers leave their jobs. In the face of these steep reductions, the potential for adversaries to try to capitalize on this brain drain has not gone unnoticed. In April, several agencies produced an alert that provided guidance on how to spot nefarious recruitment attempts and how to guard against them.
Not all efforts are covert or underhanded. Fast Company’s article “America’s loss is China’s gain: Beijing is recruiting fired U.S. scientists” discussed Chinese companies attempts to capitalize on the situation.
“This recruitment campaign highlights a broader strategic competition between the U.S. and China over leadership in critical technologies, particularly artificial intelligence,” the article explained. “In this context, the targeting of displaced American scientific personnel represents a pragmatic, if provocative, maneuver by Beijing.”
The danger is also multifaceted. Noted technology journalist Kim Zetter wrote an article on her Zero Day website highlighting efforts by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to specifically recruit former workers from the U.S. Defense Department’s Defense Digital Service (DDS), which experienced mass resignations in reaction to how DOGE was working in the Defense Department (DOD).
According to Zetter’s reporting, a UAE military officer went through official channels—the DOD’s Defense Attaché Office—and met with some of the affected DDS employees. The UAE representative said he would hire all of the workers—approximately 30 in total—“and had an extensive budget to pay them.” The work they would be charged with doing would be to direct the UAE’s planned trillion-dollar investment in artificial intelligence for the country’s military.
Zetter also tied the UAE-DDS interaction back to the sensitive area of high-level, U.S. expertise being utilized by China. “The recruitment effort from the UAE,” Zetter wrote, “comes a year after U.S. intelligence agencies and federal lawmakers expressed alarm about UAE ties to the People’s Republic of China and the potential for the UAE to share U.S.-developed AI innovations and other technologies with [China].”
She also noted that Alex Kipman, CEO and founder of Analog AI, an AI firm based in UAE, joined the meeting between the UAE military representative and DDS employees. Analog AI is linked to a company that was central to the U.S. intelligence agency warnings about UAE ties to China.
Ultimately, none of the DDS employees Zetter spoke with were planning to accept the UAE offer. “The reality is, I want to work for my own government,” Zetter reported one of them as saying. “I’m uncomfortable working for a foreign government in general, but definitely uncomfortable working for a foreign government that doesn’t have democratic values.”
Efforts by nation-states to poach knowledge and expertise from other nations is an old practice. The Greeks and Romans understood the importance of intellectual property. Britain’s emergence as the primary Western power in the 17th and 18th centuries arose, in part, because it acquired technological expertise and sought to keep it from leaving the country.
China is not the only country the United States believes is trying to exploit the online recruitment methods that have grown to dominate the hiring process over the past 20 years—especially in the past five years as remote work has increased dramatically. Security Management recently detailed North Korean efforts to get its experts hired by Western firms with the goal of corporate espionage.
The FDD memo laid out policy recommendations for the United States.
- Continue to raise awareness of the threat by providing regular briefings with private industry and current and former employees.
- The government should create so-called “sock puppet” online profiles—essentially creating fake personas with profiles that would be attractive to foreign actors, and using the profiles to discover nefarious actions by other nations.
- The United States should pressure LinkedIn and other networking and recruitment sites to better monitor suspicious activity, paying particular attention to job postings seeking former government employees with security clearance.
- Congress should provide ovrsight by holding hearings to ensure government and private sector entities are working to deal with the threat. Congress could also mandate that intelligence agencies generate a report that details attempts by foreign adversaries to recruit U.S. workers with specialized skills.
“Chinese intelligence operatives have long leveraged the Internet and the openness of American society to recruit individuals with both government and industry backgrounds,” the memo stated. “This threat is heightened at a time when thousands of former and current federal workers are seeking new employment. If the public and private sectors do not act quickly to address these vulnerabilities, China and other U.S. adversaries will continue preying on former public servants who may not be aware of the threat and face pressure to find new jobs quickly.”
