The CIA investigated thousands of unvaccinated employees as if they were potential foreign espionage and sabotage threats, a new class action lawsuit alleges.
In September 2021, former President Joe Biden mandated that federal employees and contractors receive the COVID-19 vaccine. Shortly after, the CIA’s chief operating officer directed the Counter Espionage Department (CED) to begin investigating employees and contractors who did not comply, the lawsuit alleges.
Former CIA officer James Erdman, who uncovered Langley’s alleged surveillance of its own unvaccinated employees, said in an interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation that he repeatedly pressed CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s office to remove the marks on unvaccinated employees’ personnel files but the director never took action.
“I did everything in my power to get the agency to just fix it. That’s all I wanted. Give us the answer on what happened, and fix it,” Erdman said.
Feds for Freedom — a nonprofit founded by federal employees in 2021 to challenge the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate — announced the new lawsuit on Wednesday. The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.
“When a government agency uses national security tools to punish the personal medical choices of their employees, it is agency leadership — not the employee — who has crossed the line,” said Feds For Freedom Executive Director Stephanie Weidle in a statement.
The CIA’s espionage division “utilizes invasive investigative techniques,” the legal complaint states. While security violations and HR violations can be expunged, investigatory material collected in CED investigations permanently remain in the CIA’s files. And this intelligence “can be used by the Agency for any reason it deems necessary,” the complaint states.
The CIA declined to comment.
The lawsuit was first reported by The Epoch Times.
Erdman said he learned of the CED investigations from a tip while on detail with former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
Gabbard’s declassification and accountability task force was digging into how the Biden administration weaponized the federal government against perceived political enemies under a January 2025 executive order. Erdman resigned from the CIA earlier this week and now serves as the director of development for Feds for Freedom.
In March, one of the unvaccinated employees formally requested Ratcliffe’s office remove the material dug up by the CED from his file, but never received a reply.
When pressed by Gabbard’s task force to clarify under what authority the CED investigations had been launched, the CIA did not give an answer, the legal complaint alleges.
At other federal agencies, if employees applied for religious accommodations, the government considered them compliant until after a determination was made about their application.
That’s not what happened at the CIA, according to Erdman.
Even under the Biden administration’s premise that the COVID-19 vaccine mandate was unquestionably good for the health of the CIA staff, defiance of the mandate should have been handled as insubordination rather than a counterespionage case, Erdman said.
“That is an employee insubordination issue. That’s handled differently than espionage. And that’s why this is really concerning, because you’re conflating those things,” he said.
The suit alleges violations of the Administrative Procedure Act, the law that governs federal agency procedures, and cites as plaintiffs an anonymous CIA security officer, an anonymous CIA staff operations officer and an anonymous cybersecurity architect contractor. The plaintiffs seek the removal of all adverse information from their files and “any further relief this Honorable Court deems necessary or appropriate in order to accord full and complete relief.”
(DCNF)