Bill Pulte has spent his first days as the acting director of national intelligence firing senior personnel. But according to the law, he’s not even eligible for the job he occupies.
On this matter, the act of Congress that created the position he now occupies seems unambiguous: “The Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence shall act for, and exercise the powers of” the DNI when that position is vacant, as it is now. Not “may” serve. Shall. The current principal deputy is Aaron Lukas, a career intelligence officer who is not only available to serve but has extensive national-security experience, which is another thing that the law requires. Pulte, an outspoken Trump loyalist who is also the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has none.
We’ll come to Lukas in a moment. But it’s worth dwelling on this legal point because Pulte is expected to enact significant changes to the office that he is temporarily running, and it’s not clear he has the authority to do so. Career intelligence officers, as well as some of the most senior political appointees at the ODNI, expect they may lose their jobs this week or next, current and former officials told us. A handful have already been dismissed, including William Ruger, one of the most senior officials, who was previously the president of a libertarian think tank. One U.S. official said that ODNI officials are drawing up their list of budget priorities, expecting that Pulte will use them to help him decide who stays and who can go. A few dozen people have received notices to return to their home agencies, this official added.
Career government employees, who enjoy civil-service protections, might have a pathway to challenge their dismissal. “You can’t be lawfully fired by someone who has no authority to fire you, and since Mr. Pulte was illegally appointed, he does not have that power,” Zachary West, a former Justice Department official and now counsel at Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan research and advocacy group, told us. Not that President Trump has ever been deterred from axing federal workers under dubious circumstances. He views the intelligence community as a nest of “deep state” actors who have conspired to undermine him for a decade, and has said that he wants Pulte to fire people. “I’d like to see it smaller. I think there are a lot of people in there that shouldn’t be there,” he told The Wall Street Journal this month.
Some officials have speculated that Pulte might also make structural changes, including moving the National Counterterrorism Center under the jurisdiction of another agency, perhaps the Department of Homeland Security. That could disrupt national-security operations and at a minimum would cause bureaucratic headaches as the organizational chart is redrawn. Putting aside the relative merits of such a move, which some security experts support, even a Senate-confirmed director might not have the authority to enact such a sweeping agenda absent some action by Congress. For his part, Pulte posted on X that he spent yesterday meeting with National Counterterrorism Center staff, whom he called “true professionals and American patriots,” adding that, “It is a privilege to work beside them.” Perhaps that’s a sign of a reprieve.
As of today, it appeared that Pulte may not cut as many people as earlier expected. But very senior officials may still be removed. Even political appointees who are on board with the president’s national-security and foreign policy said they may be on the chopping block, people familiar with the matter told us.
Pulte is picking up where his predecessor, Tulsi Gabbard, left off when she announced her resignation last month. She pledged to reduce staff by more than 40 percent, and reportedly came close to that target, getting rid of about 500 people in six months. She had called the ODNI “inefficient” and “rife with abuse.” The former claim was less controversial. Since its creation more than two decades ago, the ODNI has never become the central coordinator of the U.S. intelligence community that lawmakers and national-security officials had hoped. The intention was good: avoid a repeat of the breakdowns in intelligence-sharing that led to the 9/11 attacks. But in practice, it was often a cumbersome layer of additional bureaucracy with marginal influence.
How Pulte has the legal authority to do any of this housecleaning, the administration hasn’t said. The ODNI didn’t respond to my request for comment about the law regarding succession or Plute’s plans. He almost certainly doesn’t have enough support among Senate Republicans to be confirmed as the permanent director. Key lawmakers have already said he’s unqualified and too partisan (even by this administration’s standards) to serve in a role that’s supposed to be apolitical. And even within the administration, Pulte has plenty of enemies. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent acknowledged at a recent Senate hearing that, during a dispute with Pulte, Bessent threatened to “kick his ass.”
But Republicans do support more downsizing. “President Trump is right: the ODNI has grown far beyond its original mandate,” Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote on X. “Time to return these officers back to their home agencies to focus on actual intelligence work.” Cotton was persuaded to support Gabbard’s nomination in large part because she pledged to slash the workforce.
Trump has made clear what else he expects from Pulte. “He’s a very smart guy, and he may find out some things about the rigged elections,” Trump told reporters earlier this month. “I think he’d like to do it. I’d like to, I think he wants to do it very much, got a lot of energy.”
[Read: The election deniers are winning]
Gabbard was already far down that road. Her office worked with noted election deniers to conduct a review of voting machines used in Puerto Rico, looking for evidence of foreign interference that might give Trump a reason to assert national authority over elections, according to people who assisted in those efforts. But the review found no evidence that the machines were manipulated. Gabbard also showed up at the FBI raid on election offices in Fulton County, Georgia, the sort of remarkable encroachment by the intelligence community into domestic law enforcement that reforms enacted after Watergate were intended to stop.
Trump may also be counting on Pulte to selectively release classified documents that fan conspiracy theories or harass Trump’s political opponents. Gabbard made a practice of this, and so did Pulte in his capacity as a housing official. Using his access to financial documents, he made criminal referrals to the Justice Department alleging mortgage fraud by Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, Senator Adam Schiff, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and former Representative Eric Swalwell. No charges have been filed, and experts who have reviewed the cases found evidence of paperwork errors, not criminal activity.
In his first term, Trump routinely skirted vacancy rules to fill empty positions with acting officials who would do his bidding. Back then, the Justice Department argued that the president was allowed, under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, to appoint his choice to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, even though the law said who that person “shall” be. But there’s good reason to think the same sort of argument cannot overcome the clear language of the DNI statute.
There is an arguably qualified permanent director waiting in the wings. Trump has said he will nominate Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, who would be easily confirmed in the Senate. But Trump has paralyzed that process by tying the nomination to the extension of a key surveillance law as well as his demand that Congress pass the SAVE America Act, which would require people to show proof of citizenship in order to register to vote in federal elections. That bill is going nowhere, even in the Republican-controlled Congress. So Pulte presumably will be acting DNI for at least as long as it takes the White House and the Hill to resolve a standoff that was entirely of Trump’s making.
[Read: A serious Senate debate about an unserious bill]
All of this chaos seems especially needless given that the administration already has a credible official to put in the acting role—Lukas, the current principal deputy. Current and former officials who know him described Lukas to us as a hard worker who has been managing much of the day-to-day activities of the ODNI already. One official said Lukas was leading restructuring efforts that were under way with Gabbard. His reputation is that of a dutiful deputy, carrying out the administration’s agenda. But what Trump seems to want is a partisan, and that’s not a role to which career intelligence officers are usually suited. One person also described Lukas as an introvert, so perhaps he’s not cut out for the social-media ranting about the “deep state” that the director job requires these days.
The idea that ODNI needs to be reformed, slimmed down, and realigned with its original goals has support in both parties. No one is pushing to expand the office and give it more authority. Some on the Hill now want to do away with it altogether, which is something Trump has told aides and advisers he might do, according to officials we’ve talked to about his plans. Pulte may not be out to gut the office. But if he continues to eliminate senior leadership, the ODNI might just wither from neglect.
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