Gabbard slashing intelligence office workforce and cutting budget by
over $700 million
[August 21, 2025]
By AAMER MADHANI, ERIC TUCKER and ALI SWENSON
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.”
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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.
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