Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

7. Intelligence Community · Minor

Maximize ODNI and CIA direct-hire and incentive authorities

Not started

212 7. Intelligence Community

“The ODNI and CIA should maximize their direct-hire and incentive-building authorities to bring in talented and properly cleared individuals to serve in positions requiring technical, language, and cyber expertise.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    Moved nearby, not delivered. ODNI's own record of its in-window personnel posture is the ODNI 2.0 fact sheet of 2025-08-20, and what it announces is the opposite end of the pipeline from the ask: DNI Gabbard "has ended non-merit-based recruitment of IC professionals" and is "leading an IC-wide effort to rebalance and optimize its civilian and contractor workforce to reduce bloat", inside a reorganization that cut ODNI by "nearly 50%". That is hiring posture and headcount, not the direct-hire and incentive-building authorities the Quote asks the two agencies to maximize. ODNI's complete public inventory (the 536-item feed at `odni.gov/feed/`, read in full on 2026-09-03, spanning 2005 to 2026-08-20) records no expansion of hiring authority of any kind. No allowlisted record of ODNI or CIA expanding their use of direct-hire or incentive-building authorities for technical, language or cyber expertise. The Federal Register carries no direct-hire authority notice for either agency since 2025-01-20 (their whole in-window footprint is four notices: a decennial operational-files review and three Privacy Act systems of records), and P.L. 119-60 Division F contains no hiring-authority provision beyond section 6302's general pay-and-benefits increase authorization.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • Direct-hire authority for most of government is granted by OPM in the Federal Register, which is why the absence of any such notice for ODNI or CIA is meaningful; but both agencies also hold standing statutory hiring authorities they can use without publishing anything, so the negative is a limit on what is knowable rather than proof of inaction.
  • This ask is also covered by a single negative search of the CIA internal-management asks on pp. 208-212.
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ODNI and CIA direct-hire and incentive-building authorities
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