Acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte has finished a fourth round of layoffs at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence since taking charge five weeks ago, a pace that has cut the agency to well below half its original size.
Pulte announced the latest cuts on Sunday evening, just hours before the Senate was set to hold a procedural vote on his likely permanent replacement, Jay Clayton. The acting intelligence chief framed the reductions as a disciplined effort to strip the agency back to its core statutory mission.
Just the News reported Pulte's announcement, which came via a post on X under his official handle, @DNIPulte:
"Since becoming Acting Director of National Intelligence, our team has been smartly, and carefully, reducing the size of ODNI [Office of the Director of National Intelligence], re-focusing ODNI on national security, the law, and the statute. As of this evening, we just finished a 4th round of thoughtful, measured layoffs."
The ODNI was created after the September 11, 2001, attacks to coordinate the sprawling U.S. intelligence community. At its peak the office employed roughly 1,800 to 2,000 people. Under the Trump administration, that number has been slashed dramatically, first by former DNI Tulsi Gabbard, who said she laid off approximately 500 employees, or about 30 percent of the workforce, and now by Pulte across four successive rounds since June 19.
Pulte began firing ODNI employees on his second day as acting director. The speed reflected a direct mandate from President Trump, who had publicly described the office as bloated and urged Pulte to move quickly.
Fox News reported that Trump told Pulte the agency was "unnecessary and/or too big" and directed him to "start the process" of removing personnel, with particular focus on Obama and Biden administration holdovers.
Trump put the point bluntly:
"I'd like to see it smaller. I think there are a lot of people in there that shouldn't be there."
No public figures have been released for how many employees Pulte cut in each individual round. But between Gabbard's 500-to-700 reductions and Pulte's four rounds, the Washington Examiner reported the total workforce is now "likely well below half" of what it was when Trump took office.
That means an agency originally built to house nearly 2,000 intelligence professionals may now employ fewer than 900. The administration has not disclosed an exact headcount.
Pulte stepped into the acting role on June 19 after Gabbard left the position following her husband's bone cancer diagnosis. She had already begun the downsizing, but Pulte accelerated it, launching his first round of firings within 48 hours and completing three more rounds in the weeks that followed.
The stated rationale has remained consistent throughout: refocus ODNI on national security, the law, and the statute that created the office. Pulte's language, "smartly, and carefully", suggests a deliberate effort to distinguish these cuts from the chaotic federal workforce battles that have drawn court challenges elsewhere in government.
No lawsuits or formal legal challenges to the ODNI layoffs have been reported in any of the available coverage.
The timing of Sunday's announcement was notable. Jay Clayton, the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and Trump's nominee for permanent DNI, faces a Senate procedural vote on Monday. The Senate Intelligence Committee advanced Clayton's nomination, but Democrats voted unanimously against him after he declined to explicitly confirm that Joe Biden won the 2020 election.
If Clayton is confirmed, he would inherit an agency that looks fundamentally different from the one Gabbard ran just weeks ago. Pulte has reshaped the workforce before his successor even arrives, a move that ensures the downsizing cannot be easily reversed by a new director who might face different political pressures.
Alongside the layoffs, Pulte also released declassified CIA documents describing what the agency called "persistent concerns" about Venezuela's interest in manipulating electronic voting systems using Smartmatic technology. Newsmax reported the declassification as part of a broader push to release intelligence community assessments related to foreign threats to the 2020 election.
The dual moves, cutting staff and declassifying politically sensitive material, fit a pattern. The Trump administration has treated the intelligence community's post-9/11 expansion as both a bureaucratic problem and a political one, arguing that career holdovers from prior administrations have resisted the current president's agenda. Pulte's rapid pace suggests the White House views the window before Clayton's confirmation as an opportunity, not a holding period.
Congress created the ODNI in 2004 to prevent the kind of intelligence-sharing failures that preceded the September 11 attacks. The office was designed to sit above the CIA, FBI, NSA, and other agencies and coordinate their work. Over two decades it grew into a substantial bureaucracy of its own.
Critics of the downsizing, mostly Democrats on the Intelligence Committee, have raised concerns about whether gutting the coordination office could recreate the information silos the agency was built to prevent. But the administration has countered that ODNI's growth went far beyond its original mandate and that a leaner office better serves the intelligence community's actual mission.
Resistance from within the broader intelligence community has surfaced in other areas. CIA and FBI leaders have pushed back against White House directives on intelligence matters, underscoring the tension between the administration and career officials across the national security apparatus.
Several key questions remain unanswered. How many employees were let go in Sunday's fourth round? What criteria determined who stayed and who was cut? And what does the remaining workforce actually look like, in terms of seniority, specialization, and institutional knowledge? None of that has been disclosed.
What is clear is the trajectory. An agency that employed roughly 2,000 people when Trump took office may now be staffed at less than half that number, with a permanent director who has not yet been confirmed and an acting chief who has treated every week in the job as a chance to cut deeper.
Washington built the ODNI to fix a problem. Whether the fix itself became the problem is the argument this administration is making, not with white papers, but with pink slips.
