The Office of National Intelligence will dramatically reduce its workforce and cut its budget by more than US$700 million annually, the Trump administration announced on Wednesday.
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Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said in a statement: “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.”
She said the intelligence community “must make serious changes to fulfil its responsibility to the American people and the US Constitution by focusing on our core mission: find the truth and provide objective, unbiased, timely intelligence to the president and policymakers”.
The reorganisation is part of a broader administration effort to rethink its evaluation of foreign threats to American elections, a topic that has become politically loaded given US President Donald 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 (Federal Bureau of Investigation) task force focused on investigating foreign influence operations, including those that target US elections.
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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.
Gabbard’s efforts to downsize the agency she leads are in keeping with the cost-cutting mandate the administration has employed since its earliest days, when Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) oversaw mass lay-offs of the federal workforce.