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Aug 26, 2025  |  
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The Editors


NextImg:Slashing the Intelligence Office Workforce Is Just a Start

To Tulsi Gabbard’s announcement that she will slash by nearly half the staff of her agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, we can only say: It’s a start.

From its origin in Washington’s “We must do something” frenzy after almost 3,000 Americans were killed in the 9/11 atrocities, ODNI was a bad idea. To be sure, there was much to the consensus view that government intelligence failure was a major contributor to the vulnerabilities that enabled al-Qaeda’s attacks. For the most part, however, this was explained by self-induced failures driven by domestic law enforcement.

Out of concerns that the government’s foreign-counterintelligence powers (such as monitoring under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) could be abused in criminal investigations, the Clinton-era Justice Department imposed a set of internal restrictions. Infamously known as “the wall,” these directives discouraged the sharing of information between the FBI’s intelligence agents, on the one hand, and criminal investigators and prosecutors, on the other. The result was that key leads regarding the terrorists who’d entered our country were missed, and those terrorists joined the teams of suicide-hijackers that carried out the attacks.

Most of this dysfunction was cured by the dismantling of the wall. Otherwise, it bears recalling that there were already 16 agencies in what’s known as the U.S. intelligence community. To the extent that turf battles and intelligence-sharing across agencies remained challenging, it never made sense that these problems, inherent in bureaucratic sprawl, would be solved by adding yet another bureaucracy.

The initial idea was that ODNI would be a lean agency, whose job was to superintend the intelligence community, such that the right intelligence, generated and analyzed by the CIA and other components, got into the right hands. It was also believed that the job of CIA director, traditionally the top of the intelligence org chart, had gotten too big to be carried out effectively by a single official; in theory, the director of national intelligence would take some of the pressure off.

Naturally, thanks to the empire building of its first director, John Negroponte, ODNI instantly metastasized, with staff growing to twice its projected size and the budget even more than that. Today, after still more expansion, ODNI has about 1,850 employees and a budget of over $700 million. This is asinine given that the agency’s functions are duplicative. Moreover, in the two decades since ODNI’s inception, the technology for processing and analyzing intelligence data has advanced geometrically. Only in government does technological advance somehow result in the hiring of more employees to do the same work.

Of course, a federal agency with bottomless resources and no void to fill will find things to do. In ODNI’s case, that has often been politics — the politics of progressive staffers sympathetic to the party of government. Thus, ODNI has maintained, against evidence and common sense, that Iran had no intention of constructing nuclear weapons; this tied the hands of President George W. Bush with respect to potential action against Tehran’s drive for nukes and, later, eased the way for President Barack Obama’s deeply flawed (and now, fortunately, abandoned) Iran nuclear deal. And under the Obama-era stewardship of Director James Clapper, ODNI helped drive the Russiagate slander that Donald Trump was a Kremlin mole whom Russian dictator Vladimir Putin hoped to plant in the White House. Even out of office, Clapper traded on his status as former director, joining the 51 intelligence veterans who, on the eve of the 2020 election, signed the duplicitous, blatantly partisan letter suggesting that the incriminating Hunter Biden laptop bore “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

In the worthy project of paring back ODNI, Gabbard is helped along by recent court rulings acknowledging the president’s authority to reduce the executive workforce (although not to eliminate agencies created by statute, as ODNI was). Simultaneously, Senator Tom Cotton (R., Ark.), who chairs the Intelligence Committee, has proposed welcome legislation (the Intelligence Community Efficiency and Effectiveness Act) to return ODNI to its original, post-9/11 design: reducing it to 650 staffers, eliminating top positions and non-functioning components, transferring some of its duties to the CIA and FBI, and scrapping both its unnecessary National Intelligence University and any DEI training.

If we could un-ring the bell, ODNI would never have come into existence. If it is going to continue and become a national security asset, it must shed the bloat and the politics. DNI Gabbard and Senator Cotton are right to seek to make that happen.