By AAMER MADHANI, ERIC TUCKER and ALI SWENSON, Related Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Workplace of the Director of Nationwide Intelligence will dramatically cut back its workforce and minimize its funds by greater than $700 million yearly, the Trump administration introduced Wednesday.
The transfer quantities to a significant downsizing of the workplace chargeable for coordinating the work of 18 intelligence businesses, together with on counterterrorism and counterintelligence, as President Donald Trump has tangled with assessments from the intelligence neighborhood.
His administration additionally this week has revoked the safety clearances of dozens of former and present officers, whereas final month declassifying paperwork meant to name into query long-settled judgments about Russian interference within 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, unauthorized leaks of classified intelligence, and politicized weaponization of intelligence,” Tulsi Gabbard, the director of nationwide intelligence, mentioned in a press release saying a greater than 40% workforce discount.
She added: “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.”
Division tackling international affect is focused
Among the many adjustments are to the Overseas Malign Affect Heart, which is supposed to trace affect operations from overseas and threats to elections. Officers mentioned it has change into “redundant” and that its core capabilities can be built-in into different elements of the federal government.
The reorganization is a part of a broader administration effort to rethink the way it tracks international threats to American elections, a subject that has change into politically loaded given Trump’s long-running resistance to the intelligence neighborhood’s evaluation that Russia interfered on his behalf within the 2016 election.
In February, for example, Lawyer Common Pam Bondi disbanded an FBI process drive targeted on investigating international affect operations, together with people who goal U.S. elections. The Trump administration additionally has made sweeping cuts on the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Safety Company, which oversees the nation’s vital infrastructure, together with election programs. And the State Division in April mentioned it shut down its workplace that sought to cope with misinformation and disinformation that Russia, China and Iran have been accused of spreading.
Republicans cheer the downsizing, and Democrats pan it
The panel’s prime Democrat, Sen. Mark Warner, pledged to rigorously evaluate Gabbard’s proposals and “conduct rigorous oversight to ensure any reforms strengthen, not weaken, our national security.” He mentioned he was not assured that will be the case “given Director Gabbard’s track record of politicizing intelligence.”
Gabbard’s efforts to downsize the company she leads is consistent with the cost-cutting mandate the administration has employed since its earliest days, when Elon Musk and his Division of Authorities Effectivity oversaw mass layoffs of the federal workforce.
It’s the newest headline-making transfer by an official who only a few month in the past had appeared out of favor with Trump over her evaluation of Iran’s nuclear capabilities however who in latest weeks has emerged as a key loyalist along with her newest actions.
Modifications to efforts to fight international election affect
The Overseas Malign Affect Heart was created by the Biden administration in 2022 to reply to what the U.S. intelligence neighborhood had assessed as makes an attempt by Russia and different adversaries to intrude with American elections.
Its function, ODNI mentioned when it introduced the middle’s creation, was to coordinate and combine intelligence pertaining to malign affect. The workplace up to now has joined forces with different federal businesses to debunk and alert the general public to international disinformation meant to affect U.S. voters.
For instance, it was concerned in an effort to boost consciousness a couple of Russian video that falsely depicted mail-in ballots being destroyed in Pennsylvania that circulated broadly on social media within the weeks earlier than the 2024 presidential election.
Gabbard mentioned Wednesday she can be refocusing the middle’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 capabilities, she mentioned, might be merged into different operations.
The middle is about to sundown on the finish of 2028, however Gabbard is terminating it “in all but name,” mentioned Emerson Brooking, a resident fellow on the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Analysis Lab, which tracks international disinformation.
Although Gabbard mentioned in a truth sheet that the middle’s job was redundant as a result of different businesses already monitor international affect efforts concentrating on People, Brooking refuted that characterization and mentioned the duty of parsing intelligence assessments throughout the federal government and notifying decision-makers was “both important and extremely boring.”
“It wasn’t redundant, it was supposed to solve for redundancy,” he mentioned.
Initially Printed: August 20, 2025 at 4:25 PM EDT
