Tulsi Gabbard to slash US intelligence workforce by 40%, cut budget by US$700 million
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Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said in a statement: 'Over the last 20 years, ODNI has become bloated and inefficient, and the intelligence community is rife with abuse of power, unauthorised leaks of classified intelligence, and politicised weaponisation of intelligence.'
She said the intelligence community 'must make serious changes to fulfil its responsibility to the American people and the US Constitution by focusing on our core mission: find the truth and provide objective, unbiased, timely intelligence to the president and policymakers'.
The reorganisation is part of a broader administration effort to rethink its evaluation of foreign threats to American elections, a topic that has become politically loaded given US President
Donald 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 (Federal Bureau of Investigation) task force focused on investigating foreign influence operations, including those that target US elections.
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The Trump administration also has made sweeping cuts at the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which oversees the nation's critical infrastructure, including election systems.
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