President Donald Trump has called on acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Bill Pulte to shrink the office that oversees U.S. intelligence agencies, suggesting that his political opponents should be removed.
“I’d like to see it smaller. I think there are a lot of people in there that shouldn’t be there,” Trump said of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) in an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Friday.
Trump pointed to holdovers from the Obama and Biden Administrations as the likely target for cuts, according to the WSJ, and said the office that oversees 18 federal intelligence agencies was “too big.”
The office was created by an act of Congress in 2004, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, to better coordinate intelligence sharing. The DNI produces the President’s Daily Brief, a highly classified document containing contributions from all intelligence agencies presented to the president each morning. At the start of President Trump’s second term, the DNI had roughly 1,800 employees.
Read More: Who Is Bill Pulte, Trump’s New Acting Director of National Intelligence?
Trump has frequently undermined U.S. intelligence agencies throughout his first and second terms. Perhaps his most notable clash came when he sided with Russian President Vladimir Putinover the assessment of U.S. intelligence that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Trump.
When asked by TIME about whether the ODNI has active plans to reduce staffing, an ODNI official noted the efforts of former director Tulsi Gabbard, who reduced the agency’s staff by nearly 50% during her tenure and cut the budget by more than $700 million annually.
“We look forward to working with Mr. Pulte and President Trump to continue that work and advance further initiatives aimed at rooting out deep state bad actors and securing saving for the American taxpayer,” the official said.
Trump’s comments offer some insight into his appointment of Pulte as acting director of the office—a move that incensed Democrats and confused members of Trump’s own Republican party. Pulte has no national intelligence experience and is currently the Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), a position he used to bring criminal referrals against Trump’s political adversaries, alleging mortgage fraud.
Members of Congress fear a politicized DNI
Some members of Congress have expressed worry over a similarly politically weaponized DNI.
“We don’t need a weaponized DNI, we need professionals there,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a Republican, told reporters on Tuesday. Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, meanwhile, called Pulte’s appointment evidence of Trump wanting “someone who will be willing to shape intelligence around the president’s wishes.”
Other Republican lawmakers, however, have celebrated the potential for downsizing the office. “President Trump is right: the ODNI has grown far beyond its original mandate,” Republican Sen. Tom Cotton wrote on X.
Pulte might not need the Senate’s approval if he moves to sharply shrink the office. The president named him director on an acting basis, a role that doesn’t require Senate confirmation. He can serve in the role for 210 days.
Trump defended Pulte’s lack of national intelligence experience, saying it could be good for him to “shake it up.”
“If he [Pulte] reduced the size, in conjunction with me…and in conjunction with possibly the person coming in…he can do a lot of the hard work and we wouldn’t have to saddle somebody that goes in,” Trump told the Journal.
He also told reporters on Thursday that Pulte might investigate “the rigged elections”, hours after he claimed on social media without evidence that Democrats were cheating in California’s primaries this week.
The President noted the gutting of the Department of Education in 2025 by Education Secretary Linda McMahon as an example of what might be in store for the ODNI. Trump has said he wishes to dismantle the department wholly, but that would require an act of Congress.
“We’ve made the Department of Education much smaller, and likewise, this should be much smaller,” Trump said, suggesting that the DNI could also eventually be “terminated”.
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