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The Trump administration announced a $700 million budget cut and 40% workforce reduction for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard (Credits: Reuters)
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) will significantly reduce its workforce and cut its budget by over $700 million annually, the Trump administration announced on 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.
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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, unauthorised leaks of classified intelligence, and politicised weaponisation of intelligence,” Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said in a statement announcing a more than 40% workforce reduction.
She added: “Ending the weaponisation of intelligence and holding bad actors accountable are essential to begin to earn the American people’s trust which has long been eroded.” Division tackling foreign influence is targeted Among the changes are to the Foreign Malign Influence Centre, 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 reorganisation 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 towards 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 politicising 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 favour 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 Centre 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 centre’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 centre’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.
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The News Desk is a team of passionate editors and writers who break and analyse the most important events unfolding in India and abroad. From live updates to exclusive reports to in-depth explainers, the Desk d…Read More
The News Desk is a team of passionate editors and writers who break and analyse the most important events unfolding in India and abroad. From live updates to exclusive reports to in-depth explainers, the Desk d… Read More
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