Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced on Wednesday plans to cut her “bloated” department’s workforce by over 40% by the end of September, billing the effort as an initiative to save taxpayers over $700 million annually.
After the reorganization wraps up at the end of fiscal 2025, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence will have around 1,300 staffers, down from the roughly 1,800 employed by the agency at the start of Gabbard’s tenure under the Trump administration.
Gabbard argued this week that the latest workforce reduction effort was needed to help the country’s premier intelligence department to “refocus on executing its core national security mission with integrity in the most agile, effective, and efficient way.”
“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,” she said in a statement.
ODNI and the intelligence community must make “serious changes to fulfill its responsibility to the American people and the United States Constitution by focusing on our core mission: find the truth and provide objective, unbiased, timely intelligence to the President and policymakers,” she added.
ODNI’s External Research Council and Strategic Futures Group will be cut entirely because they “operated as hubs for injecting partisan priorities into intelligence projects,” Gabbard said, according to Axios. Three other offices will be shut down and their staffers transferred to different departments because of concerns about redundancies, with the New York Post reporting that the Foreign Malign Influence Center, National Counterproliferation and Biosecurity Center, and the Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center will be taken up either by ODNI’s Mission Integration office or the National Intelligence Council.
Gabbard reportedly briefed Trump, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is also operating as the country’s national security adviser, about the planned force reduction two weeks ago.
The ODNI chief’s latest moves to reform her “politicized” department come after she, earlier this week, cut the security clearances of 37 current and former intelligence officials accused of having “abused the public trust,” including several involved in a 2017 federal report concluding Trump collaborated with Russia to help him defeat Hillary Clinton.
“Being entrusted with a security clearance is a privilege, not a right,” Gabbard said. “Those in the Intelligence Community who betray their oath to the Constitution and put their own interests ahead of the interests of the American people have broken the sacred trust they promised to uphold.”
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Her statement came amid an effort to put various Obama-era officials suspected of targeting Trump with investigations to hinder his hopes of winning the presidency under a microscope.
Last month, Gabbard submitted multiple criminal referrals to the Justice Department probing former President Barack Obama, former CIA Director John Brennan, and ex-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper over concerns they illegally conspired to fabricate links between Trump and the Russian government.