Pulte cuts 51 ODNI staff as Trump pushes downsizing

Bill Pulte cut 51 staff members from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, removing six career and political intelligence staff and sending 45 others back to their home agencies. A source familiar with the personnel moves said the people affected either had no assigned tasks or were working from outdated assignments, a sign that the purge was aimed at immediate capacity rather than broad layoffs alone.

The cuts landed inside an intelligence headquarters created after the September 11, 2001 attacks to coordinate the nation’s spy agencies, making the scale of the pullback unusually sensitive in Washington. No staffers were removed from ODNI’s counterterrorism group, but the trimming still reached deep into an office that exists to knit together work across the intelligence community, including analysts, managers and detailees pulled in from other agencies.

Trump had publicly directed Pulte on June 10 to carry out an immediate downsizing of ODNI and return personnel to their home agencies, and Pulte assumed the acting director role around June 19. One source described the changes as thoughtful and methodical. Pulte had been asking deputies and other directors for suggestions about cuts, and some of those deputies pushed for more reductions, but Pulte said 51 was enough for now.

The move also revived a long-running fight over ODNI’s size and mission. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, said earlier this month that the office had “grown far beyond its original mandate” and pushed legislation aimed at realigning resources to intelligence missions, eliminating duplicative and inefficient bureaucracy and returning ODNI to its original size and scope. Much of ODNI’s workforce is made up of staff detailed from other intelligence agencies, which has made returning people to their home agencies a central part of the downsizing push.

Democrats on the intelligence committees warned that an acting director without national security experience should not make sweeping personnel changes. Mark Warner of Virginia and Jim Himes of Connecticut cautioned Pulte against large-scale cuts and raised concerns about preserving records and safeguarding classified materials during his tenure. Warner has since introduced legislation that would bar presidents from installing acting directors of national intelligence, a direct response to the controversy around Pulte’s appointment.

The shakeup came on top of an earlier ODNI reorganization announced by Tulsi Gabbard in August 2025 that was projected to cut nearly half the workforce and save more than $700 million a year. That earlier reduction already put pressure on the office’s ability to coordinate intelligence work, and the latest cuts sharpen the question of whether the Trump-Pulte overhaul is a legitimate streamlining or a politically driven disruption of the country’s central intelligence hub.