Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has announced plans to cut the agency’s staff by almost 50% as she organises the office.
Gabbard, announcing the cuts, said the agency had become “bloated and inefficient” over the last two decades. Its annual budget will also be reduced by $700m, she said.
She said the “serious changes” would consolidate teams across the agency and ensure it was fulfilling its mission to “provide objective, unbiased, timely intelligence”.
The announcement came hours after Gabbard said the Trump administration would revoke the security clearances for 37 current and former US officials.
Among other changes announced by Gabbard, the restructuring eliminates the Foreign Malign Influence Center, which monitors foreign efforts to influence the American public. A fact sheet said that function was already performed by other US intelligence units.
The fact sheet said Gabbard was also getting rid of units that track weapons of mass destruction and cyber threats, saying that work, too, is performed by another intelligence unit. Also going is a group that produced long-range forecasts of global trends.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) had around 1,800 employees when Gabbard took the helm. She has already reduced staff by about 25 percent, according to the Federal News Network, which focuses on news about the federal workforce.
The revocation of security clearances was announced in a memo posted on social media, in which Gabbard directed several national security agency heads to immediately strip the officials of their clearances, stating the move was ordered by the president. She accused them of politicising intelligence for partisan or personal gain.
The officials include several national security aides who served under former Democratic presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama.
Gabbard offered no evidence to support the accusations in the memo.
Security clearances grant access to sensitive government information, and some former officials retain them to advise successors. Some private sector jobs such as those in defence and aerospace can require access to security clearances as a pre-condition for employment.
It remains unclear whether all 37 individuals listed in the memo still held active clearances.
Gabbard said Trump ordered the revocations because the officials had “abused the public trust by politicizing and manipulating intelligence, leaking classified intelligence without authorization, and or committing intentional egregious violations of tradecraft standards”.
“Being entrusted with a security clearance is a privilege, not a right,” Gabbard wrote on X. “Those in the Intelligence Community who betray their oath to the Constitution and put their own interests ahead of the interests of the American people have broken the sacred trust they promised to uphold.”
The memo did not lay out charges against specific individuals.
This is not the first time the Trump administration has revoked security clearances for intelligence officials.
The administration has previously done the same for Biden, his Vice-President Kamala Harris, and former lawmakers involved in investigations of the US Capitol riot four years ago.
In recent weeks, Gabbard has led the charge against Obama-era intelligence officials who concluded that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election, which Trump won.
Trump and Gabbard have described the intelligence community’s assessment as a “treasonous conspiracy” to undermine the president’s electoral success.
Democrats have dismissed the moves as a political distraction, and accused the White House of deflecting attention from unpopular policies and Trump’s alleged ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
“These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction,” a spokesman for Obama said last month.
