The C.I.A. has moved to dismiss an unspecified number of officers who were working on recruiting and diversity issues, according to former officials, in what would be one of the largest mass firings in the agency’s history.
The possible purge of the officers comes as the agency moves to comply with the spirit of President Trump’s executive order banning efforts to diversify the federal work force.
The C.I.A. on Friday began calling in officers who had been put on administrative leave and telling them to resign or be fired, but a federal court soon halted that action. A judge in the Eastern District of Virginia is scheduled to hold a hearing on Monday to consider a temporary restraining order against the agency.
In a court filing on Thursday, the government lawyers said that John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, could seek to fire more people, following the White House executive order ending diversity hiring. A lawyer for the officers, Kevin Carroll, said the filing suggested the firings were only beginning.
While presidents often order policy changes at the agency, it is rare for career officers who carried out the priorities of a previous administration to be fired, the former officials said. Former President Barack Obama, for example, ended the C.I.A. interrogation program started under former President George W. Bush but did not fire the officers accused of torturing Al Qaeda prisoners.
The C.I.A. last conducted a large-scale firing in 1977, when President Jimmy Carter ordered the agency to move away from covert action. Stansfield Turner, the C.I.A. director at the time, moved to fire 198 officers involved in clandestine action. But even that downsizing was done with some care, sparing some people who were close to retirement age.
Mr. Carroll, a former C.I.A. officer and the lawyer representing 21 intelligence officers who have sued to stop the new firings, said about 51 officers working in diversity and recruiting were having their positions reviewed.
None of the officers the agency wants to fire are diversity experts, Mr. Carroll said. He and other former officials said the officers had been ordered during the Biden administration to take the posts because of their skills at persuasion and recruiting, abilities that in some cases they honed while working as spies overseas.
“No one joins the C.I.A. to be a diversity recruiter,” Mr. Carroll said.
Some officials previously said they hoped that the agency would be spared diversity-related firings, and that officers would be able to return to their old jobs of recruiting spies overseas.
Former officials said that the national security exception the White House put in place on downsizing the federal government should have prevented the firings. Mr. Carroll said Mr. Trump’s executive order required only that the agency end diversity programs, not that the people carrying out the initiatives be fired.
In the legal filing Thursday, government lawyers argued that a restraining order blocking the firings would “harm the public interest.” It would constrain Mr. Ratcliffe’s ability to make personnel decisions, and authority the lawyers noted that the Supreme Court has said is due “extraordinary deference.”
Expanding the diversity of the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies was a priority of William J. Burns, who led the agency during the Biden administration, and Avril Haines, the former director of national intelligence.
Mr. Carroll said his clients had been carrying out orders of the intelligence leaders and Congress, which mandated efforts to diversify the intelligence agencies in recent authorization acts.
“More than any other organization in the U.S. government, the C.I.A. has a requirement for diversity,” Mr. Carroll said. “We need to have people who can mix in overseas.”