America’s intelligence community just got smaller. By how much is debatable, but the direction is not.
Donald Trump’s newly installed acting Director of National Intelligence, Bill Pulte, has fired six career and political intelligence staff from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and sent 45 others back to their home agencies. These 51 removals, confirmed by multiple sources to CBS News, mark the first wave of what Trump has openly demanded: a purge of the people who gather and analyze the secrets that keep the United States ahead of its adversaries.
Pulte stepped into the role less than a week ago, after Tulsi Gabbard vacated the post. He walked in with no intelligence experience, no military service, no time in Congress, no diplomatic credentials, and no law enforcement background. His qualification, as Senator Mark Warner put it bluntly in a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, is that “he has shown that he is willing to do anything that President Trump wants, legal or otherwise.”
The firings were not Pulte’s idea. They were Trump’s. The president posted on Truth Social earlier this month directing Pulte to “execute the immediate and needed downsizing of the office.” In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Trump said he wanted Pulte to “start the process” of firing ODNI personnel and praised his acting director as “less shackled” than a Senate-confirmed appointee would be.
This is the central paradox of Trump’s second term, and it demands an honest question that few in Washington are asking. Trump is simultaneously pursuing a foreign policy of raw American dominance, and actively undermining the one institution that makes dominance possible.
Consider what Trump wants. His administration has pursued tariff wars with over 90 countries simultaneously. It has threatened to reclaim the Panama Canal, buy Greenland, absorb Canada, and redraw the Western Hemisphere’s power map. Trump has pressured NATO allies, demanded territory from Denmark, waged economic war on China, and pushed for a global realignment of spheres of influence. The White House’s own “Peace Through Strength” doctrine, published in February, calls for “renewed American leadership and global security” on a scale not seen since the Cold War.
These ambitions require intelligence. They require analysts who speak Farsi and Mandarin, who understand the inner workings of Beijing’s Politburo and Tehran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps. They require the kind of institutional knowledge that takes decades to build and can be destroyed in a single afternoon of personnel cuts.
Trump is choosing the afternoon.
The ODNI was created after the September 11 attacks precisely because the intelligence community failed to connect the dots. The 9/11 Commission found that a lack of coordination between the CIA, FBI, and other agencies allowed the plot to succeed. The office was designed to force those agencies to talk to each other, to share what they knew, and to present a unified picture of threats to the president.
Pulte and his allies argue the office has become bloated. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, has said ODNI “grew far beyond its original mandate.” There is some truth to this. Gabbard had already cut hundreds of positions in 2025, reducing the headcount from around 2,000 to roughly 1,300. The office, like many government agencies, accumulated layers of bureaucracy over two decades.
But the question is not whether ODNI could be leaner. It could. The question is who is doing the cutting, why, and to what end.
Pulte is a housing finance official. He runs the Federal Housing Finance Agency. He was appointed to oversee the intelligence community because Trump trusts him, not because he understands the difference between a signals intelligence intercept and a human source report. When Warner asked what qualifications Pulte brings to the role, the answer was effectively zero by any standard measure.
What Pulte brings is obedience. And that is precisely what Trump wants.
The president does not want intelligence that challenges him. He does not want analysts who present uncomfortable conclusions about Russia’s intentions or China’s capabilities if those conclusions conflict with his political narrative. He wants an intelligence community that serves him, not the nation. And the surest way to get that is to remove the professionals who understand their duty runs to the Constitution, not to the man in the Oval Office.
This is the deeper danger. A president who demands global dominance while eviscerating the institutions that provide global awareness is not pursuing strength. He is pursuing control. He wants the intelligence apparatus to tell him what he wants to hear, to confirm his worldview, and to disappear the people who might complicate it.
The 51 staff removed this week are just the start. Trump’s acting director was preparing to fire 400 people from the National Counterterrorism Center alone, according to sources who spoke with CNN. When Jay Clayton, Trump’s nominee for the permanent DNI role, is confirmed, the purge may slow. But it will not reverse direction. The political logic is clear: a weakened intelligence community cannot push back against a president who treats secrets as weapons and classified information as patronage.
History has a pattern here. Authoritarian leaders do not build strong intelligence services to keep their nations safe. They build intelligence services that are loyal to them personally, and they destroy the parts that are not. Trump is doing both at once. He is hollowing out the professional intelligence corps while installing people whose primary qualification is personal fealty.
The paradox is not really a paradox at all. Weakening the intelligence community while pursuing global domination makes perfect sense if your definition of domination is personal rather than national. You do not need spies who can tell you the truth. You need enforcers who will tell you what you want to hear and disappear the people who refuse to comply.
America is not becoming stronger by firing its intelligence professionals. It is becoming more brittle, more blind, and more dependent on the loyalty of a single man whose only qualification is that he said yes.