Bill Pulte has been Acting Director of National Intelligence for roughly four weeks. In that time, he's conducted four separate rounds of layoffs at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, axing over 50 intelligence officials who apparently weren't essential enough to survive a basic staffing review.
Pulte took over at ODNI at the end of June after Tulsi Gabbard stepped down from the role to care for her cancer-stricken husband. He didn't spend his first month redecorating the office or scheduling "listening sessions" with career staff. He started cutting. Pulte announced the latest round on Saturday, posting that "since becoming Acting Director of National Intelligence, our team has been smartly, and carefully, reducing the size of ODNI."
The key word there is "carefully." This isn't a guy swinging a machete through the org chart for headlines. He described the process as "thoughtful, measured layoffs" — which is bureaucrat-speak for "we looked at what you actually do, and the answer was not enough."
ODNI has been one of the most bloated nodes in the intelligence apparatus, a coordinating body that somehow managed to grow its own empire of analysts, advisors, and deputy-assistant-to-the-assistant types who answer to nobody the voters ever heard of.
Another interesting tidbit about this story is that Pulte is just a placeholder. President Trump has nominated Jay Clayton — the former SEC chairman — as his permanent pick for DNI, and Clayton is currently awaiting Senate confirmation. That means Pulte knows his window is limited, and he's using every day of it. There's something clarifying about a leader who understands he's temporary and acts accordingly, instead of slow-walking decisions to protect his tenure.
The usual corners of Washington will frame this as reckless which is the same thing they said when Director Gabbard started her own housecleaning. It's a strange argument to make about an office whose primary institutional knowledge over the past several years has included getting the Russia collusion assessment catastrophically wrong, missing the Afghanistan collapse, and producing intelligence estimates that read like DNC opposition research.
What Pulte is doing at ODNI is what every incoming administration promises and almost none deliver: actually shrinking the bureaucracy that exists to perpetuate itself. The intelligence community has 18 agencies and an annual budget north of $100 billion. ODNI was created after 9/11 to coordinate between them. Twenty-plus years later, the coordinating body has its own sprawling staff, its own internal politics, and its own institutional incentive to justify its headcount by producing more paper, more briefings, and more reasons to exist.