Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Wednesday announced the next phase in a dramatic scaling back of the office she leads, including large staffing reductions that will reduce the size of her department by nearly 50% and cut its budget by more than $700 million a year.
Gabbard described the project, dubbed ODNI 2.0, as a long-needed transformation of an agency that had grown bloated and needed to be refocused on its core national security mission.
“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,” Gabbard said in a statement. “ODNI and the IC 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.”
An ODNI document outlining the new initiative said that since Gabbard started as director of national intelligence, the agency has already reduced its size by nearly 30%, cutting more than 500 staffers. The agency had some 1,850 to 2,000 employees when Gabbard was confirmed in February, according to various reports.
President Trump has reportedly discussed with Gabbard the idea of shutting down ODNI completely — and that reportedly remains a possibility. “Gabbard has told the president she's fine with being the last-ever DNI, but her review found that ODNI still serves an important role for the intelligence community,” Axios reports, citing unnamed officials.
Why it matters: “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 President Donald Trump’s long-running resistance to the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia interfered on his behalf in the 2016 election,” the Associated Press says. “In February, for instance, 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.”