WASHINGTON: The US Office of the Director of National Intelligence will dramatically reduce its workforce and cut its budget by more than $700 million annually, the Trump administration announced Wednesday.
The move amounts to a major downsizing of the office responsible for coordinating the work of 18 intelligence agencies, including on counterterrorism and counterintelligence, as President Donald Trump has tangled with assessments from the intelligence community.
His administration also this week has revoked the security clearances of dozens of former and current officials, while last month declassifying documents meant to call into question long-settled judgments about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
“Over the last 20 years, ODNI has become bloated and inefficient, and the intelligence community is rife with abuse of power, unauthorized leaks of classified intelligence, and politicized weaponization of intelligence,” Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said in a statement announcing a more than 40 percent workforce reduction.
She added: “Ending the weaponization of intelligence and holding bad actors accountable are essential to begin to earn the American people’s trust which has long been eroded.”
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of US national intelligence, speaks with reporters at the White House on July 23, 2025. (AP/File)
Division tackling foreign influence is targeted
Among the changes are to the Foreign Malign Influence Center, which is meant to track influence operations from abroad and threats to elections. Officials said it has become “redundant” and that its core functions would be integrated into other parts of the government.
The reorganization is part of a broader administration effort to rethink how it tracks foreign threats to American elections, a topic that has become politically loaded given Trump’s long-running resistance to the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia interfered on his behalf in the 2016 election.
In February, for instance, Attorney General Pam Bondi disbanded an FBI task force focused on investigating foreign influence operations, including those that target US elections. The Trump administration also has made sweeping cuts at the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which oversees the nation’s critical infrastructure, including election systems. And the State Department in April said it shut down its office that sought to deal with misinformation and disinformation that Russia, China and Iran have been accused of spreading.
Republicans cheer the downsizing, and Democrats pan it
Reaction to the news broke along partisan lines in Congress, where Sen. Tom Cotton, Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, praised the decision as “an important step toward returning ODNI to that original size, scope, and mission. And it will help make it a stronger and more effective national security tool for President Trump.”
The panel’s top Democrat, Sen. Mark Warner, pledged to carefully review Gabbard’s proposals and “conduct rigorous oversight to ensure any reforms strengthen, not weaken, our national security.” He said he was not confident that would be the case “given Director Gabbard’s track record of politicizing intelligence.”
Gabbard’s efforts to downsize the agency she leads is in keeping with the cost-cutting mandate the administration has employed since its earliest days, when Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency oversaw mass layoffs of the federal workforce.
It’s the latest headline-making move by an official who just a few month ago had seemed out of favor with Trump over her analysis of Iran’s nuclear capabilities but who in recent weeks has emerged as a key loyalist with her latest actions.
Changes to efforts to combat foreign election influence
The Foreign Malign Influence Center was created by the Biden administration in 2022 to respond to what the US intelligence community had assessed as attempts by Russia and other adversaries to interfere with American elections.
Its role, ODNI said when it announced the center’s creation, was to coordinate and integrate intelligence pertaining to malign influence. The office in the past has joined forces with other federal agencies to debunk and alert the public to foreign disinformation intended to influence US voters.
For example, it was involved in an effort to raise awareness about a Russian video that falsely depicted mail-in ballots being destroyed in Pennsylvania that circulated widely on social media in the weeks before the 2024 presidential election.
Gabbard said Wednesday she would be refocusing the center’s priorities, asserting it had a “hyper-focus” on work tied to elections and that it was “used by the previous administration to justify the suppression of free speech and to censor political opposition.” Its core functions, she said, will be merged into other operations.
The center is set to sunset at the end of 2028, but Gabbard is terminating it “in all but name,” said Emerson Brooking, a resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, which tracks foreign disinformation.
Though Gabbard said in a fact sheet that the center’s job was redundant because other agencies already monitor foreign influence efforts targeting Americans, Brooking refuted that characterization and said the task of parsing intelligence assessments across the government and notifying decision-makers was “both important and extremely boring.”
“It wasn’t redundant, it was supposed to solve for redundancy,” he said.
Security clearances of 37 officials revoked
On Tuesday, the Trump administration said that it was revoking the security clearances of 37 current and former national security officials in the latest act of retribution targeting public servants from the federal government’s intelligence community.
A memo from Gabbard accused the singled-out individuals of having engaged in the “politicization or weaponization of intelligence” to advance personal or partisan goals, failing to safeguard classified information, failing to “adhere to professional analytic tradecraft standards” and other unspecified “detrimental” conduct.
The memo did not offer evidence to back up the accusations.
Many of the officials who were targeted left the government years ago after serving in both senior national security positions and lower-profile roles far from the public eye. Some worked on matters that have long infuriated Trump, like the intelligence community assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election on his behalf. And several signaled their concerns about Trump by signing a critical letter in 2019 that was highlighted on social media last month by right-wing provocateur and close Trump ally Laura Loomer.
The action is part of a broader Trump administration campaign to wield the levers of government against perceived adversaries, and reflects the president’s continued distrust of career intelligence officials he has long seen as working against his interests. The revocation of clearances has emerged as a go-to tactic for the administration, a strategy critics say risks chilling dissenting voices from an intelligence community accustomed to drawing on a range of viewpoints before formulating an assessment.
“These are unlawful and unconstitutional decisions that deviate from well-settled, decades-old laws and policies that sought to protect against just this type of action,” Mark Zaid, a national security lawyer whose own clearance was revoked by the Trump administration, said in a statement.
He called it hypocritical for the administration to “claim these individuals politicized or weaponized intelligence.”
Gabbard on Tuesday sought to defend the move, which she said had been directed by Trump.
“Being entrusted with a security clearance is a privilege, not a right,” she wrote on X. “Those in the Intelligence Community who betray their oath to the Constitution and put their own interests ahead of the American people have broken the sacred trust they promised to uphold.”
The security clearance suspension comes amid a broader effort by Gabbard and other Trump administration officials to revisit the intelligence community assessment published in 2017 on Russian election interference, including by declassifying a series of years-old documents meant to cast doubt on the legitimacy of its findings.
Trump has also revoked the clearances of former President Joe Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris, and he attempted to do the same for lawyers at a spate of prominent law firms but was rebuffed by federal judges.
Some of those who were targeted in the latest action were part of Biden’s national security team. Many only learned of the Gabbard action from news reports Tuesday, said two former government officials who were on the list. Both spoke on the condition of anonymity as they ponder whether to take legal action.