Congress recently received figures showing the Office of the Director of National Intelligence shed close to 200 more employees since the start of June, a reduction that hadn't been publicly disclosed until the Washington Post reported on the data this week. Combined with earlier rounds of departures, the agency's headcount now sits at little more than half the roughly 2,000 people it employed when the president's second term began. One outlet's count put the number at around 1,300 by the time the last director left in mid-June, meaning the newest 200-person reduction lands on top of a workforce that had already been cut nearly in half.
Congress stood up ODNI more than two decades ago to fix the intelligence-sharing breakdowns that let the September 11 attacks go undetected, and the office still runs the National Counterterrorism Center today. That mission hasn't shielded it from criticism. President Trump and Republican lawmakers have long argued the agency grew into something far bigger than the lean coordinating body Congress originally chartered — a complaint that predates this year's cuts and has shaped nearly every staffing decision since.
Two Directors, One Shrinking Roster
The latest departures span a leadership handoff that was itself unusually tangled. Tulsi Gabbard notified the president in a resignation letter that she would step down, citing her husband Abraham's diagnosis with a rare form of bone cancer, with her departure effective June 30. Trump initially said her deputy would hold the job on an interim basis, then reversed course days later and tapped Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte for the role instead, with Pulte actually starting his acting duties on June 19 — nearly two weeks before Gabbard's own exit date. That overlap means it's genuinely unclear how many of the 200 newest departures happened under Gabbard's watch versus Pulte's. The president has been blunt about what he wants from the office going forward, telling reporters at one point simply, "I'd like to see it smaller."
This isn't the office's first slimming-down. Gabbard rolled out her own restructuring push, dubbed "ODNI 2.0," in the summer of 2025, framing it as a way to save more than $700 million a year while refocusing the agency on coordination rather than growth. How large that original plan actually was depends on which account you read: CBS News reported at the time of her resignation that she'd aimed to cut around 40 percent of the staff, a figure Senate Intelligence Chairman Tom Cotton has also cited, while ABC News' original coverage of the rollout described the target as cutting nearly half the workforce. Later reporting suggested actual cuts in the plan's first six months landed closer to 30 percent, with officials eyeing 50 percent as an eventual goal.
A Contentious Path to a Permanent Chief
Trump's pick to take the job on a permanent basis, Jay Clayton — who chaired the Securities and Exchange Commission during Trump's first term and currently serves as the U.S. attorney in Manhattan — cleared the Senate Intelligence Committee on a party-line 9-8 vote on July 21, with GOP leaders aiming to hold a full floor vote before senators leave for the August recess. Majority Leader John Thune filed for cloture the day after the committee vote, setting up a final confirmation vote for as early as the following week.
Clayton's confirmation hearing turned tense when Democrats pressed him on the 2020 election. He told the panel at one point, "I'm not an election denier," and acknowledged that Joe Biden was certified as president through the Electoral College process — but he repeatedly declined to say outright that Biden won. Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff pushed hardest on the point, accusing the nominee of not being "honest and forthright" with the committee after several rounds of unanswered follow-ups.
Democrats Sound the Alarm
Weeks before the newest job-loss figures surfaced, the top Democrats on the House and Senate intelligence panels — Sen. Mark Warner and Rep. Jim Himes — wrote to Pulte warning that sweeping personnel moves by an acting director, made without consulting Congress, risked undermining an office created specifically to prevent another pre-9/11-style intelligence failure. Their letter argued that such structural changes are simply "not an appropriate course of action for anyone in an acting capacity," and separately reminded Pulte of his legal duty to preserve records tied to any personnel or declassification decisions made during his tenure — including messages sent on personal devices or encrypted apps.
Neither Clayton nor the White House has laid out publicly what a "right-sized" ODNI should actually look like beyond simply being smaller, according to Julia Curlee, who left her post directing intelligence programs inside Trump's White House last year and has since resigned from the CIA after two decades as an analyst. She described the effect on staff bluntly: "morale is pretty terrible, as you would imagine." Some Republicans do have a specific number in mind — Cotton has said publicly that he believes the office's proper size is "dozens, maybe a couple hundred" staffers, a fraction of even its current, shrunken form.
Part of a Bigger Federal Purge
The reductions at ODNI are a small piece of a much larger downsizing across the executive branch. A Government Accountability Office report issued this month found that roughly 256,000 federal employees — about 11 percent of the civilian workforce — lost their jobs in 2025 alone. ODNI's precise current headcount remains classified, leaving lawmakers and outside observers to rely on congressional aides' estimates rather than an official tally — a gap likely to resurface once the full Senate takes up Clayton's nomination in the coming days.
