The intelligence community that hid Chinese election interference from a sitting president, ran shadow government operations to protect Joe Biden, altered Presidential Daily Briefings, and packed burn bags full of documents it hoped would never see daylight is now 200 employees smaller than it was in January. And Bill Pulte isn’t finished.
The Acting Director of National Intelligence, Bill Pulte, announced his fourth round of layoffs and restructuring Sunday evening on X — “thoughtful, measured” in his own description, and part of a systematic effort to strip the ODNI down to its statutory core and refocus it on national security rather than whatever it had become under decades of bureaucratic expansion.
The scope of what’s been accomplished since Tulsi Gabbard resigned in June is significant. The Washington Post — citing the cuts with the barely concealed horror of an institution watching its allies get fired — reported the ODNI has “quietly cut about 200 jobs since June 1.” The office, which started Trump’s second term with approximately 2,000 employees, is now “little more than half that size,” according to congressional aides. In the intelligence world, that’s not a trim. That’s a restructuring.
Understanding why this is necessary requires remembering what Trump’s primetime address revealed last week. CIA analysts deliberately softened assessments of Chinese election interference. FBI officials described themselves as running a “shadow government” specifically to hide sensitive intelligence from the White House. NSA personnel altered a Presidential Daily Briefing to conceal the conclusion that China was working to defeat the sitting president. Burn bags full of documents ordered destroyed by the Obama administration were found unburned in FBI headquarters.
This is the institutional culture that Pulte is now operating inside. The ODNI coordinates all 18 intelligence agencies — it sits at the top of the apparatus that produced every one of those documented failures. The idea that meaningful reform can happen without significant personnel changes is not serious. You cannot fix an institution by leaving the people who broke it in place and asking nicely.
The media framing of these cuts as politically motivated purges of career professionals deserves direct rebuttal. Some of what’s been cut undoubtedly includes genuine career professionals who were caught in a broad restructuring. But the intelligence community’s own documented behavior — captured in now-declassified documents, congressional testimonies, and inspector general reports — demonstrates that “career professional” and “nonpartisan actor” are not synonyms in the modern American intelligence establishment. The FBI had officials voting for Biden and opposing Trump’s immigration enforcement while serving on the Vice President’s protective detail. The CIA had analysts who deliberately buried assessments unfavorable to Democratic electoral interests. These are not hypothetical concerns.
Pulte spent time with the National Counterterrorism Center team last month and called them “true professionals and American patriots.” The distinction between those professionals and the ones being removed is exactly the right distinction to make.
Four rounds complete. The restructuring continues. The intelligence community that was used as a political weapon against a sitting president is being rebuilt into something that serves the country instead.