Gabbard slashing intelligence office workforce, cutting budget by more than US$700 million

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard speaks with reporters in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House, Wednesday, July 23, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence will dramatically reduce its workforce and cut its budget by more than US$700 million annually, the Trump administration announced Wednesday.

U.S. 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, unauthorized leaks of classified intelligence, and politicized weaponization of intelligence.”

She said the intelligence community “must make serious changes to fulfill its responsibility to the American people and the U.S. Constitution by focusing on our core mission: find the truth and provide objective, unbiased, timely intelligence to the President and policymakers.”

The reorganization 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 U.S. 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, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi disbanded an FBI task force focused on investigating foreign influence operations, including those that target U.S. elections. The Trump administration also has made sweeping cuts at the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which oversees the nation’s critical infrastructure, including election systems.

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 U.S. Department of Government Efficiency oversaw mass layoffs of the federal workforce.

It’s the latest headline-making move by a key official who just a few months 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.

She’s released a series of documents meant to call into question the legitimacy of the intelligence community’s findings on Russian election interference in 2016, and this week, at Trump’s direction, revoked the security clearances of 37 current and former government officials.

The ODNI in the past has joined forces with other federal agencies to debunk and alert the public to foreign disinformation intended to influence U.S. 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.

Notably, Gabbard said she would be refocusing the priorities of the Foreign Malign Influence Center, which her office says on its website is “focused on mitigating threats to democracy and U.S. national interests from foreign malign influence.”

It wasn’t clear from Gabbard’s release or fact sheet exactly what the changes would entail, but Gabbard noted its “hyper-focus” on work tied to elections and said the center was “used by the previous administration to justify the suppression of free speech and to censor political opposition.”

The Biden administration created the Foreign Malign Influence Center in 2022, responding to what the U.S. 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.

In a briefing given to reporters in 2024, ODNI officials said they only notified candidates, political organizations and local election offices of disinformation operations when they could be attributed to foreign sources. They said they worked to avoid any appearance of policing Americans’ speech.

Sen. Tom Cotton, the Republican chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, hailed the decision to broadly revamp ODNI, saying it would make it a “stronger and more effective national security tool for President Trump.”

Aamer Madhani, Eric Tucker And Ali Swenson, The Associated Press