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Arab News
19 minutes ago
- Arab News
Trump slashing intelligence office workforce and cutting budget by over $700 million
WASHINGTON: The US Office of the Director of National Intelligence will dramatically reduce its workforce and cut its budget by more than $700 million annually, the Trump administration announced Wednesday. The move amounts to a major downsizing of the office responsible for coordinating the work of 18 intelligence agencies, including on counterterrorism and counterintelligence, as President Donald Trump has tangled with assessments from the intelligence community. His administration also this week has revoked the security clearances of dozens of former and current officials, while last month declassifying documents meant to call into question long-settled judgments about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. 'Over the last 20 years, ODNI has become bloated and inefficient, and the intelligence community is rife with abuse of power, unauthorized leaks of classified intelligence, and politicized weaponization of intelligence,' Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said in a statement announcing a more than 40 percent workforce reduction. She added: 'Ending the weaponization of intelligence and holding bad actors accountable are essential to begin to earn the American people's trust which has long been eroded.' Division tackling foreign influence is targeted Among the changes are to the Foreign Malign Influence Center, which is meant to track influence operations from abroad and threats to elections. Officials said it has become 'redundant' and that its core functions would be integrated into other parts of the government. The reorganization is part of a broader administration effort to rethink how it tracks foreign threats to American elections, a topic that has become politically loaded given 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 task force focused on investigating foreign influence operations, including those that target US elections. 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. And the State Department in April said it shut down its office that sought to deal with misinformation and disinformation that Russia, China and Iran have been accused of spreading. Republicans cheer the downsizing, and Democrats pan it Reaction to the news broke along partisan lines in Congress, where Sen. Tom Cotton, Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, praised the decision as 'an important step toward returning ODNI to that original size, scope, and mission. And it will help make it a stronger and more effective national security tool for President Trump.' The panel's top Democrat, Sen. Mark Warner, pledged to carefully review Gabbard's proposals and 'conduct rigorous oversight to ensure any reforms strengthen, not weaken, our national security.' He said he was not confident that would be the case 'given Director Gabbard's track record of politicizing intelligence.' Gabbard's efforts to downsize the agency she leads is in keeping with the cost-cutting mandate the administration has employed since its earliest days, when Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency oversaw mass layoffs of the federal workforce. It's the latest headline-making move by an official who just a few month ago had seemed out of favor with Trump over her analysis of Iran's nuclear capabilities but who in recent weeks has emerged as a key loyalist with her latest actions. Changes to efforts to combat foreign election influence The Foreign Malign Influence Center was created by the Biden administration in 2022 to respond to what the US intelligence community had assessed as attempts by Russia and other adversaries to interfere with American elections. Its role, ODNI said when it announced the center's creation, was to coordinate and integrate intelligence pertaining to malign influence. The office in the past has joined forces with other federal agencies to debunk and alert the public to foreign disinformation intended to influence US voters. For example, it was involved in an effort to raise awareness about a Russian video that falsely depicted mail-in ballots being destroyed in Pennsylvania that circulated widely on social media in the weeks before the 2024 presidential election. Gabbard said Wednesday she would be refocusing the center's priorities, asserting it had a 'hyper-focus' on work tied to elections and that it was 'used by the previous administration to justify the suppression of free speech and to censor political opposition.' Its core functions, she said, will be merged into other operations. The center is set to sunset at the end of 2028, but Gabbard is terminating it 'in all but name,' said Emerson Brooking, a resident fellow at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, which tracks foreign disinformation. Though Gabbard said in a fact sheet that the center's job was redundant because other agencies already monitor foreign influence efforts targeting Americans, Brooking refuted that characterization and said the task of parsing intelligence assessments across the government and notifying decision-makers was 'both important and extremely boring.' 'It wasn't redundant, it was supposed to solve for redundancy,' he said.
Al Arabiya
6 hours ago
- Al Arabiya
Former CIA director Burns calls Trump firings of US workers ‘a war on...expertise'
William Burns, former CIA director and veteran US diplomat, on Wednesday issued a scathing rebuke of the Trump administration's mass firings of federal workers, saying they are aimed at stifling dissenting views and will harm US security. 'Under the guise of reform, you all got caught in the crossfire of a retribution campaign - of a war on public service and expertise,' Burns wrote in a 'Letter to America's Discarded Public Servants' published in The Atlantic magazine. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Burns was CIA director under Democratic former President Joe Biden, and a foreign service officer. He served three Democratic and three Republican presidents. His career included stints as US ambassador to Russia and deputy secretary of State. Taking aim at US President Donald Trump's sweeping purge of federal workers, including State Department staff and US intelligence officers, Burns said that civil servants recognize the need for serious government reforms. 'But there is a smart way and a dumb way to tackle reform, a humane way and an intentionally traumatizing way,' he said. 'This is not about reform. It's about retribution. It's about breaking people and breaking institutions by sowing fear and mistrust throughout our government.' 'That's what autocrats do,' Burns said. 'They cow public servants into submission, and in doing so, they create a closed system that is free of opposing views and inconvenient concerns.' Burns cited Russian President Vladimir Putin's 'foolish decision' to launch his February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine as an example of how an absence of dissenting policy views led to 'catastrophic' results for the Kremlin. The threat to the US 'is not from an imaginary 'deep state' bent on' undermining Trump, he wrote, but 'a weak longer able to uphold the guardrails of our democracy or help the United States compete in an unforgiving world.'
Asharq Al-Awsat
7 hours ago
- Asharq Al-Awsat
Iran and Belarus Agree to Boost Bilateral Defense Ties
The leaders of Belarus and Iran signed new agreements on Wednesday to boost bilateral ties in key areas including defense, the two governments said. Presidents Alexander Lukashenko and Masoud Pezeshkian signed a package of 13 documents in the Belarusian capital, Minsk. Both governments have been placed under heavy sanctions, limiting potential trading partners. Pezeshkian said Iran would help Belarus to 'neutralize' such measures, citing Tehran's decades of experience circumventing Western economic restrictions. Lukashenko told Pezeshkian that Belarus was 'ready to cooperate with you on all issues — from providing your country with food to military-technical cooperation,' calling the Iranian president a 'friend.' The two parties did not disclose any further details on how the countries intend to cooperate in the defense sector. Other areas covered by the agreement include industry and tourism, as well as joint initiatives in science, technology and education. Access to Belarus' wood processing and chemical industry, as well as potash fertilizers, can all bring potential benefits to Iran. The two presidents also said their countries would start work toward a strategic partnership treaty. Lukashenko, a close ally of President Vladimir Putin, allowed Russia to use Belarusian territory as a staging ground for Moscow' full-scale invasion of Ukraine and later allowed the deployment of Russian tactical nuclear missiles. Iran has supplied Russia with drones for use in the war, and Pezeshkian signed a strategic cooperation treaty with Putin in January, although it did not include a mutual defense clause. The Iranian president's visit to Minsk has been postponed several times due to US strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities. Lukashenko called the strikes on Iran's nuclear infrastructure 'a serious threat to regional and international stability and security.' 'We support Iran's legitimate right to develop peaceful nuclear energy,' Lukashenko said.
