Gabbard Plan Would Shrink Intelligence Center Focused on Election Threats
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Diverging Reports Breakdown
Gabbard slashing intelligence office workforce, cutting budget by more than $700 million
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence will cut its budget by more than $700 million. The move amounts to a major downsizing of the office responsible for coordinating the work of 18 intelligence agencies. The reorganization is part of a broader administration effort to rethink how it tracks foreign threats to U.S. elections. The changes are to the Foreign Malign Influence Center, which is meant to track influence operations from abroad and threats to elections. It’s the latest headline-making move by an official who just a few month ago had seemed out of favor with Trump over her analysis of Iran’s nuclear capabilities. The State Department in April said it shut down its office that sought to deal with misinformation and disinformation that Russia, China and Iran have been accused of spreading in the U.K. and elsewhere. The office in the past has joined forces with other federal agencies to debunk and alert the public to foreign disinformation intended to influence U.N. leaders and the media, officials say. The center is set to sunset at the end of 2028, but will be merged into other operations.
The move amounts to a major downsizing of the office responsible for coordinating the work of 18 intelligence agencies, including on counterterrorism and counterintelligence, as President Donald Trump has tangled with assessments from the intelligence community.
His administration also this week has revoked the security clearances of dozens of former and current officials, while last month declassifying documents meant to call into question long-settled judgments about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
“Over the last 20 years, ODNI has become bloated and inefficient, and the intelligence community is rife with abuse of power, unauthorized leaks of classified intelligence, and politicized weaponization of intelligence,” Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said in a statement announcing a more than 40% workforce reduction.
She added: “Ending the weaponization of intelligence and holding bad actors accountable are essential to begin to earn the American people’s trust which has long been eroded.”
Division tackling foreign influence is targeted
Among the changes are to the Foreign Malign Influence Center, which is meant to track influence operations from abroad and threats to elections. Officials said it has become “redundant” and that its core functions would be integrated into other parts of the government.
The reorganization is part of a broader administration effort to rethink how it tracks foreign threats to American elections, a topic that has become politically loaded given Trump’s long-running resistance to the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia interfered on his behalf in the 2016 election.
In February, for instance, Attorney General Pam Bondi disbanded an FBI task force focused on investigating foreign influence operations, including those that target U.S. elections. The Trump administration also has made sweeping cuts at the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which oversees the nation’s critical infrastructure, including election systems. And the State Department in April said it shut down its office that sought to deal with misinformation and disinformation that Russia, China and Iran have been accused of spreading.
Republicans cheer the downsizing, and Democrats pan it
Reaction to the news broke along partisan lines in Congress, where Sen. Tom Cotton, Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, praised the decision as “an important step towards returning ODNI to that original size, scope, and mission. And it will help make it a stronger and more effective national security tool for President Trump.”
The panel’s top Democrat, Sen. Mark Warner, pledged to carefully review Gabbard’s proposals and “conduct rigorous oversight to ensure any reforms strengthen, not weaken, our national security.” He said he was not confident that would be the case “given Director Gabbard’s track record of politicizing intelligence.”
Gabbard’s efforts to downsize the agency she leads is in keeping with the cost-cutting mandate the administration has employed since its earliest days, when Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency oversaw mass layoffs of the federal workforce.
It’s the latest headline-making move by an official who just a few month ago had seemed out of favor with Trump over her analysis of Iran’s nuclear capabilities but who in recent weeks has emerged as a key loyalist with her latest actions.
Changes to efforts to combat foreign election influence
The Foreign Malign Influence Center was created by the Biden administration in 2022 to respond to what the U.S. intelligence community had assessed as attempts by Russia and other adversaries to interfere with American elections.
Its role, ODNI said when it announced the center’s creation, was to coordinate and integrate intelligence pertaining to malign influence. The office in the past has joined forces with other federal agencies to debunk and alert the public to foreign disinformation intended to influence U.S. voters.
For example, it was involved in an effort to raise awareness about a Russian video that falsely depicted mail-in ballots being destroyed in Pennsylvania that circulated widely on social media in the weeks before the 2024 presidential election.
Gabbard said Wednesday she would be refocusing the center’s priorities, asserting it had a “hyper-focus” on work tied to elections and that it was “used by the previous administration to justify the suppression of free speech and to censor political opposition.” Its core functions, she said, will be merged into other operations.
The center is set to sunset at the end of 2028, but Gabbard is terminating it “in all but name,” said Emerson Brooking, a resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, which tracks foreign disinformation.
Though Gabbard said in a fact sheet that the center’s job was redundant because other agencies already monitor foreign influence efforts targeting Americans, Brooking refuted that characterization and said the task of parsing intelligence assessments across the government and notifying decision-makers was “both important and extremely boring.”
“It wasn’t redundant, it was supposed to solve for redundancy,” he said.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Gabbard slashing intelligence office workforce and cutting budget by over $700 million
The move amounts to a major downsizing of the office responsible for coordinating the work of 18 intelligence agencies. Among the changes are to the Foreign Malign Influence Center, which is meant to track influence operations from abroad and threats to elections. The reorganization is part of a broader administration effort to rethink how it tracks foreign threats to American elections. Sen. Tom Cotton, Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, praised the decision as “an important step towards returning ODNI to that original size, scope, and mission.” The panel’s top Democrat, Sen. Mark Warner, pledged to carefully review Gabbard’s proposals and “conduct rigorous oversight to ensure any reforms strengthen, not weaken, our national security” and said he was not confident that would be the case “given Director Gabbar’s track record of politicizing intelligence’” (http://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2017/07/28/tulsi-gabbard-downsize-director-of-national-intelligence-decision.html#storylink=cpy)
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Office of the Director of National Intelligence will dramatically reduce its workforce and cut its budget by more than $700 million annually, the Trump administration announced Wednesday.
The move amounts to a major downsizing of the office responsible for coordinating the work of 18 intelligence agencies, including on counterterrorism and counterintelligence, as President Donald Trump has tangled with assessments from the intelligence community.
His administration also this week has revoked the security clearances of dozens of former and current officials, while last month declassifying documents meant to call into question long-settled judgments about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
“Over the last 20 years, ODNI has become bloated and inefficient, and the intelligence community is rife with abuse of power, unauthorized leaks of classified intelligence, and politicized weaponization of intelligence,” Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said in a statement announcing a more than 40% workforce reduction.
She added: “Ending the weaponization of intelligence and holding bad actors accountable are essential to begin to earn the American people’s trust which has long been eroded.”
Division tackling foreign influence is targeted
Among the changes are to the Foreign Malign Influence Center, which is meant to track influence operations from abroad and threats to elections. Officials said it has become “redundant” and that its core functions would be integrated into other parts of the government.
The reorganization is part of a broader administration effort to rethink how it tracks foreign threats to American elections, a topic that has become politically loaded given Trump’s long-running resistance to the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia interfered on his behalf in the 2016 election.
In February, for instance, Attorney General Pam Bondi disbanded an FBI task force focused on investigating foreign influence operations, including those that target U.S. elections. The Trump administration also has made sweeping cuts at the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which oversees the nation’s critical infrastructure, including election systems. And the State Department in April said it shut down its office that sought to deal with misinformation and disinformation that Russia, China and Iran have been accused of spreading.
Republicans cheer the downsizing, and Democrats pan it
Reaction to the news broke along partisan lines in Congress, where Sen. Tom Cotton, Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, praised the decision as “an important step towards returning ODNI to that original size, scope, and mission. And it will help make it a stronger and more effective national security tool for President Trump.”
The panel’s top Democrat, Sen. Mark Warner, pledged to carefully review Gabbard’s proposals and “conduct rigorous oversight to ensure any reforms strengthen, not weaken, our national security.” He said he was not confident that would be the case “given Director Gabbard’s track record of politicizing intelligence.”
Gabbard’s efforts to downsize the agency she leads is in keeping with the cost-cutting mandate the administration has employed since its earliest days, when Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency oversaw mass layoffs of the federal workforce.
It’s the latest headline-making move by an official who just a few month ago had seemed out of favor with Trump over her analysis of Iran’s nuclear capabilities but who in recent weeks has emerged as a key loyalist with her latest actions.
Changes to efforts to combat foreign election influence
The Foreign Malign Influence Center was created by the Biden administration in 2022 to respond to what the U.S. intelligence community had assessed as attempts by Russia and other adversaries to interfere with American elections.
Its role, ODNI said when it announced the center’s creation, was to coordinate and integrate intelligence pertaining to malign influence. The office in the past has joined forces with other federal agencies to debunk and alert the public to foreign disinformation intended to influence U.S. voters.
For example, it was involved in an effort to raise awareness about a Russian video that falsely depicted mail-in ballots being destroyed in Pennsylvania that circulated widely on social media in the weeks before the 2024 presidential election.
Gabbard said Wednesday she would be refocusing the center’s priorities, asserting it had a “hyper-focus” on work tied to elections and that it was “used by the previous administration to justify the suppression of free speech and to censor political opposition.” Its core functions, she said, will be merged into other operations.
The center is set to sunset at the end of 2028, but Gabbard is terminating it “in all but name,” said Emerson Brooking, a resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, which tracks foreign disinformation.
Though Gabbard said in a fact sheet that the center’s job was redundant because other agencies already monitor foreign influence efforts targeting Americans, Brooking refuted that characterization and said the task of parsing intelligence assessments across the government and notifying decision-makers was “both important and extremely boring.”
“It wasn’t redundant, it was supposed to solve for redundancy,” he said.
Aamer Madhani, Eric Tucker And Ali Swenson, The Associated Press
Gabbard: ODNI to slash costs, workforce by 40% as part of major intel agency overhaul
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence will undergo a massive reorganization. One of its goals is “reduce bloat by nearly 50%,” in a reference to the workforce. The move is expected to save taxpayers over $700 million annually. President Donald Trump and Gabbard have called the politicization and weaponization of intelligence, and hold “bad actors accountable” The ODNI was established in April 2005 after the blue ribbon 9/11 Commission exposed systemic failures across the intelligence community, including the CIA, NSA and several military intelligence agencies. its biggest restructuring since it was created after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist acts to improve intelligence sharing and operations, the agency said in a news release. It did not provide details of what that refocus will entail, or a similar plan to overhaul the ODNI’s National Counterproliferation and Biosecurity Center (NCBC) and its Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center (CTIIC) Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, acknowledged that there is broad agreement that ODNI “is in need of thoughtful reform”
WASHINGTON – Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced Aug. 20 that her office overseeing all U.S. intelligence agencies will undergo a massive reorganization and slash its spending by 40% to combat “abuse of power” and “politicized weaponization of intelligence.”
Gabbard called the overhaul ODNI 2.0 in a news release, and its broad contours suggest it is the biggest restructuring of the agency since it was created after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist acts to improve intelligence sharing and operations. One of its goals is “reduce bloat by nearly 50%,” in a reference to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s workforce.
The move is expected to save taxpayers over $700 million annually and better enable ODNI to focus on “fulfilling its critical role of serving as the central hub for intelligence integration, strategic guidance, and oversight over the Intelligence Community,” said the late afternoon news release.
“Over the last 20 years, ODNI has become bloated and inefficient, and the intelligence community is rife with abuse of power, unauthorized leaks of classified intelligence, and politicized weaponization of intelligence,” Gabbard said in the release. “ODNI and the IC must make serious changes to fulfill its responsibility to the American people and the U.S. Constitution by focusing on our core mission: find the truth and provide objective, unbiased, timely intelligence to the President and policymakers.”
Intel agency long a focus of Trump’s ire
The ODNI was established in April 2005 after the blue ribbon 9/11 Commission exposed systemic failures across the intelligence community. Its purpose was to integrate intelligence from – and provide oversight over – all of the various intel elements of the U.S. government, including the CIA, the eavesdropping National Security Agency and several military intelligence agencies.
Trump has frequently attacked the agency as politicized against him, and has vowed, along with Gabbard, to downsize and restructure it. Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, sponsored legislation June 27 to cap the ODNI staff at 650, down from what he said was about 1,600, to eliminate certain reporting requirements and to transfer some key counterintelligence and counterproliferation responsibilities back to the CIA.
The ODNI news release said ODNI 2.0 will eliminate redundant missions, functions and personnel, and make “critical investments in areas that support the President’s national intelligence priorities.”
It will also expose what President Donald Trump and Gabbard have called the politicization and weaponization of intelligence, and hold “bad actors accountable.”
Going after those involved in ‘Russia Hoax’
That effort expands on a campaign that Gabbard already has launched to investigate Democrats in the Obama and Biden administrations that she claims falsified intelligence to concoct a false “Russia Hoax” about Trump complicity in the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 election.
Multiple investigations and reports, including a bipartisan effort by the Senate Intelligence Committee, have found that Russia did indeed meddle in the 2016 election to help Trump defeat his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.
One key target of the new overhaul is the ODNI’s efforts to call out Russia for continued interference in U.S. elections, including the 2024 president campaign, through its multi-agency Foreign Malign Influence Center or FMIC.
Refocusing FMIC’s mission will save American taxpayers at least $7 million per year, according to an ODNI 2.0 fact sheet released by the spy agency. It did not provide details of what that refocus will entail, or a similar plan to overhaul the ODNI’s National Counterproliferation and Biosecurity Center (NCBC) and its Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center (CTIIC).
“ODNI’s hyper-focus on election-related work notably began in 2017, immediately following the publication of the manufactured Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) falsely alleging Putin ‘aspired’ to help President Trump win the 2016 election,” the fact sheet said.
‘No confidence’ Gabbard is right person to conduct ODNI overhaul
Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat and vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, acknowledged in a statement that there is broad, bipartisan agreement that the ODNI “is in need of thoughtful reform.”
The current Intelligence Authorization Act directs Gabbard to submit a plan to Congress outlining her proposed changes, Warner said, “and we will carefully review her proposals and conduct rigorous oversight to ensure any reforms strengthen, not weaken, our national security.”
“But given Director Gabbard’s track record of politicizing intelligence – including her decision just yesterday to revoke security clearances from career national security officials – I have no confidence that she is the right person to carry out this weighty responsibility,” Warner said.
Gabbard announced Aug. 19 that Trump had directed her office to revoke security clearances from 37 former intelligence officials for “politicizing and manipulating intelligence.” Most were affiliated with the Biden and Obama administrations or signatories to public protests of Trump’s policies.
Warner and other Democrats have also criticized Gabbard for forming a task force that amounts to nothing less than a “witch hunt” for officers and analysts within the 18 U.S. intelligence agencies it deems disloyal to Trump.
Cotton, the committee chair, called ODNI 2.0 “an important step to return the department to its original size, scope and mission.”
“I look forward to working with @DNIGabbard to implement these reforms and ensuring the IC focuses on its core mission: stealing secrets from our adversaries,” Cotton said in a post on X.
This story has been updated to include additional information.
Josh Meyer is USA TODAY’s Domestic Security Correspondent. You can reach him by email at jmeyer@usatoday.com. Follow him on X at @JoshMeyerDC and Bluesky at @joshmeyerdc.bsky.social.
Gabbard announces 40% cut to workforce at key U.S. intelligence office
The reorganization is part of a broader administration effort to rethink its evaluation of foreign threats to U.S. elections. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard says the intelligence community is rife with abuse of power, unauthorized leaks and politicized weaponization of intelligence. It’s the latest headline-making move by a key official who just a few months ago had seemed out of favor with Trump but who in recent weeks has emerged as a key loyalist.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said in a statement, “Over the last 20 years, ODNI has become bloated and inefficient, and the intelligence community is rife with abuse of power, unauthorized leaks of classified intelligence, and politicized weaponization of intelligence.”
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Office of the Director of National Intelligence will dramatically reduce its workforce and cut its budget by more than $700 million annually, the Trump administration announced Wednesday.
The reorganization is part of a broader administration effort to rethink its evaluation of foreign threats to American elections, a topic that has become politically loaded given President Donald Trump’s long-running resistance to the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia interfered on his behalf in the 2016 election.
In February, for instance, Attorney General Pam Bondi disbanded an FBI task force focused on investigating foreign influence operations, including those that target U.S. elections. The Trump administration also has made sweeping cuts at the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which oversees the nation’s critical infrastructure, including election systems.
Gabbard’s efforts to downsize the agency she leads is in keeping with the cost-cutting mandate the administration has employed since its earliest days, when Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency oversaw mass layoffs of the federal workforce.
It’s the latest headline-making move by a key official who just a few months ago had seemed out of favor with Trump over her analysis of Iran’s nuclear capabilities but who in recent weeks has emerged as a key loyalist.
She’s released a series of documents meant to call into question the legitimacy of the intelligence community’s findings on Russian election interference in 2016, and this week, at Trump’s direction, revoked the security clearances of 37 current and former government officials.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/20/us/politics/gabbard-odni-reorganization.html