Yes, the CF program is on hold.

They have been continuing to offer the exam and they have been continuing to process applications through the QEP however, they have not hired a class of CFs in more than one full calendar year. They did not provide extensions on the register for people who were on the register but not hired with the last class in March 2020. (This means that it has been almost 14 months since they last pulled names from the register and so you can conclude that almost every single person that was on the register but was not hired in March of last year has now timed off of the register, you only have 18 months.) They have assigned many second tour CFs to posts that have nothing to do with their language because the demand at high volume visas posts where language skills are in demand has dropped to nothing and will not recover for sometime. At some posts, it is highly likely (and the moving of personnel around to posts unrelated to the language they were hired for and the long freeze on hiring and lack of any plan to hire in 2021 all support this) that many posts will not return to the levels of visa demand that the CF program was created to support for years and years to come. If you are hanging your optimism on vaccines, remember that a tiny fraction of the world has been vaccinated in the MONTHS since vaccines started rolling out. 15% of the US has been vaccinated, but many countries have either not begun vaccinations or have only just begun in the last two weeks. Covid variants will become the dominant forms of the virus on earth in most countries before May and the vaccines are not all entirely effective against them.

Even if you felt the vaccine numbers were really making a huge difference already, remember that international travel has collapsed and the industries and businesses that facilitate it are in complete shambles.

Most major economies on earth are putting longer and more strict quarantine and entry requirements in place now not fewer and shorter.

The major reasons for travel to the US in China are all rapidly evaporating and the geopolitical situation is moving rapidly away from any kind of return to the volume of visa applications the US mission in China once had anytime soon. Public sentiment in China is rapidly shifting away from study and travel to the US and that attitude is being encouraged in every conceivable way by the Chinese government. If you are a hopeful Mandarin CF, your odds are poor.

Portuguese hires very few CFs anyway, pre pandemic.

Russian hires very few CFs anyway and that program was ended years ago now. If there is anyone left in the pipeline of Russian speakers who were in medical and security/suitability clearance for this entire time I’d be surprised. There might be, but they can’t be more than a handful.

Spanish however, that one might still hire people sometime in the future. There will always, always be a need for adjudicators at border posts. Future Spanish CF classes might be smaller and might see their options for postings become almost entirely border posts, but if anyone is going to be hired anytime soon (in the next two years that is) through this program, it will likely be Spanish speaking CFs.