MCLEAN, Virginia — Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard informed her office Wednesday of a 40% reduction in personnel and the wholesale closure of centers she found had politicized intelligence as part of a sweeping overhaul of the top spy office.
Months of audits by Gabbard’s handpicked team of intelligence officials has culminated in “ODNI 2.0,” as the overhaul project has been deemed, the first in the office’s history.
“Twenty years after the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s (ODNI) creation in response to the 9/11 intelligence failures, we stand at a crossroads,” Gabbard told staff Wednesday afternoon, according to a copy of the email viewed by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Gabbard told staff in the email that the ODNI programmatic review had revealed stagnant decision-making, mission creep, bloated bureaucracy and weaponized intelligence.
“Thank you for your service and dedication,” Gabbard wrote.
ODNI staff will begin receiving pink slips and officials detailed from other intelligence agencies will begin returning to their home agencies effective Sept. 30, the email says.
Combined with other efficiency measures by President Donald Trump, including an executive order to remove Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs, the ODNI has been reduced by nearly 50%. The new effort will bring ODNI’s total headcount to around 1,300 personnel, down from about 2,000, according to senior ODNI officials.
The reform push comes as former intelligence officials, including former DNI James Clapper, face a grand jury investigation related to allegations they conspired to frame President Donald Trump as beholden to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The changes could soon expand to other agencies in the 18-organization constellation that makes up the intelligence community (IC).
“We wanted to get our own house in order first,” said a senior ODNI official who assisted in the months-long mission review at a roundtable with reporters held at Liberty Crossing, ODNI’s campus in McClean, Virginia.
Gabbard approached the effort willing to close ODNI entirely and become history’s last spy chief, but decided that it was unnecessary after a programmatic review determined that reform was possible, the senior ODNI officials said. Gabbard appealed to ODNI staff for suggestions on her first day in office.
ODNI will also shutter three centers and redirect their missions back to ODNI Mission Integration, including two offices that the team found had politicized intelligence.
ODNI will shutter the Foreign Malign Influence Center (FMIC), the National Counterproliferation and Biosecurity Center (NCBC) and the Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center (CTIIC).
The FMIC had a multiyear relationship with social media companies, ostensibly to combat foreign intelligence, according to an ODNI fact sheet. But FMIC was found to have coordinated with Twitter, Facebook and Google to suppress news stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop.
NCBC leadership downplayed intelligence pointing to a lab origin of COVID-19, former government officials told the DCNF.
The National Intelligence University’s programs will be subsumed into the National Defense University and shuttered as a standalone university, a shift that Department of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has agreed to.
The overhaul will also impact the Strategic Futures Group and the External Research Council, which Gabbard described in her email to staff as “hubs for injecting partisan priorities into IC products.”
The External Research Group was founded just last year by partisan actors in the National Intelligence Council who have already been removed by Gabbard for leaking classified info.
The charges are expected to save $700 million annually. ODNI 2.0 is also examining whether $1 billion in intelligence spending should be redirected as priorities have evolved.
ODNI was first created by 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, which Congress passed with the aim of resolving the intelligence stovepiping that preceded the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Yet intelligence silos have persisted, recent reporting and declassifications have revealed.
A 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment concluded that Russia aspired for Trump to win the election and interfered in the 2016 election with a clear preference for the Republican candidate in a process that violated tradecraft standards. The raw intelligence, much of it spun or wholly manufactured, had been withheld from officials outside of a tiny cell overseen by former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John Brennan, documents declassified in recent days revealed.
An IC ombudsman determined in 2021 that CIA officials violated analytic standards set out in the 2004 law to downplay intelligence related to 2020 election interference by China because they opposed the president’s policies on China.
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