The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is looking to significantly slash its workforce in the coming weeks, the agency’s head announced on Wednesday.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said the agency is planning to reduce its size by more than 40% before the end of fiscal year 2025 as part of an “ODNI 2.0” restructuring, which she said would save more than $700 million per year. FY25 ends on Sept. 30.
ODNI was established following the September 11th terrorists to head up the work of the U.S. intelligence community. Gabbard said in a statement, however, that since its creation, “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.”
ODNI had slightly less than 2,000 staff at the start of the Trump administration. The size of the agency’s workforce has already decreased to around 1,500 as of mid-August, with another roughly 200 personnel expected to be let go as part of the 2.0 restructuring.
“Ending the weaponization of intelligence and holding bad actors accountable are essential to begin to earn the American people’s trust which has long been eroded,” she added. “Under President Trump’s leadership, ODNI 2.0 is the start of a new era focused on serving our country, fulfilling our core national security mission with excellence, always grounded in the U.S. Constitution, and ensuring the safety, security, and freedom of the American people.”
The agency also said it plans to eliminate or consolidate a number of its programs and components that have been deemed to be redundant or overly partisan.
ODNI said in a fact sheet that its 2.0 approach includes “refocusing functions within the Foreign Malign Influence Center, the National Counterproliferation and Biosecurity Center, and the Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center, and integrating core functions and expertise from those offices into ODNI’s Mission Integration (MI) and the National Intelligence Council (NIC).”
The agency’s External Research Council and its Strategic Futures Group are both also marked for termination, with ODNI saying the programs “operated as hubs for injecting partisan priorities into intelligence products.”
President Donald Trump and his Republican allies have long been suspicious of the U.S. intelligence community, particularly in light of its assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election on behalf of Trump, as well as concerns that it includes a ‘deep state’ of entrenched bureaucrats working to undermine the administration’s priorities.
Gabbard has also moved to crack down on dissent across the IC, including announcing on Tuesday that she was revoking the security clearances of 37 current and former U.S. officials on the grounds that they had politicized their roles.
That move also came after Gabbard fired two top officials on the National Intelligence Council in May after the intelligence body composed an assessment that contradicted Trump’s claims that Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro was overseeing the activities of a violent gang operating in the U.S.
Even before Gabbard announced the 2.0 plan, some top GOP lawmakers had already pushed to slim down ODNI’s operations.
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, previously introduced legislation in June to cap ODNI’s full-time workforce at 650 and significantly restructure or terminate a number of its internal entities.
In a statement on Wednesday, Cotton said the ODNI 2.0 restructuring will make the agency “a stronger and more effective national security tool for President Trump.”
