Pulte Dismisses Top ODNI Experts on World’s Hot Spots

Purge Includes Many Senior Staff at the National Intelligence Council

From the front lines at Liberty Crossing:

The termination notices came early in the morning via email—from Human Resources. Then the new managers in the front office came by and, in a cool, “professional” manner, assured the cashiered staff that they weren’t being axed because they were suspected of being part of some “Deep State” plot to undermine the president. But the more than 50 intelligence officials and analysts—including a huge chunk of the senior staff at the National Intelligence Council (NIC)—who were abruptly fired this week by the new acting Director of National Intelligence, Bill Pulte, were given no further explanation for their dismissals.

The NIC is charged with being the ODNI “bridge” that conveys finished intelligence products to policymakers. But no cause for removal was cited to the dismissed staff members; no adverse personal actions were reported to justify any of the cuts, which in most cases transferred officials who had been detailed to ODNI back to their home agencies. “It was done with a sledgehammer,” said an ODNI source intimately familiar with the tumultuous events inside the office’s Liberty Crossing complex in northern Virginia this week. “But there seemed to be a randomness to it.”

It could have been worse. According to one report, Pulte planned an immediate bloodletting of some 300 jobs from the 1,300-strong staff.

In one sense, the smaller purge by Pulte— chief of an obscure federal housing agency with no national security experience, who had earned a reputation as a Trump attack dog—— was a relief, especially after congressional Democrats warned that some of the cuts that the new director was contemplating at the National Counterterrorism Center could have a direct impact on national security. But the cuts were still widely viewed internally as indiscriminate, with no rhyme nor reason to them—other than to wipe out the senior ranks of veteran intelligence analysts dealing with many of the world’s hot spots and national security threats.

The new boss. (ODNI)

So among those canned, the source said, were the senior national intelligence officers (NIOs) for Russia-Ukraine, Europe, East Asia, China and weapons of mass destruction.

These were the officers responsible for coordinating reporting from 17 disparate agencies across the intelligence community, resolving internal disputes and, in many cases, serving as “crisis managers” when their respective areas of responsibility blew up and grabbed the world’s attention. They also for the most part had a reputation as nonpartisan professionals who prided themselves on their analytic rigor. But in the Trump administration, they paid a price for their independence. It was, after all, the very same (now decimated) National Intelligence Council that last year produced a report contradicting President Trump’s claim that the Venezuelan government was directing the Tren de Aragua criminal gang in an invasion of the U.S. homeland — a finding that prompted then-director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard to fire the acting NIC chair and his deputy.

Ironically, according to the ODNI insider, among those given their marching orders this week to clear out of Liberty Crossing was a handful of remaining aides to Gabbard, including Olivia Coleman, ODNI’s chief spokesperson (“I am no longer with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence,” was the response to an email to her on Thursday from SpyTalk) and Walter Ruger, the deputy ODNI director for mission integration, who was placed on “administrative leave.”

Gabbard’s aides were suspected by Pulte’s team of leaking embarrassing details about his opening days as acting director when he reportedly asked to be given access to a government plane and whether he could take classified documents home with him (to which the answer was a resounding no.)

Shrinking the Bloat

To be sure, there has been a growing number of critics in recent years who have argued that ODNI—created more than 20 years ago to address the intelligence failures that led up to 9/11—had become a somewhat bloated and redundant bureaucracy that deserved some sharp cuts if not wholesale elimination. Gabbard had obliged, cutting some 500 positions in 2025. And Sen. Tom Cotton, the Arkansas Republican who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, praised Pulte’s first round of additional cuts on the Senate floor as a “step in the right direction.”

But aside from the mini-vindictiveness of Pulte going after the senior aides to the (equally vindictive) Gabbard, the breadth of the intelligence cuts could have tangible bureaucratic, if not real world consequences, according to the ODNI source. To the extent that ODNI and NIC senior intelligence officers have a primary mission, it is to make sure sensitive intelligence is shared and “coordinated” throughout the community and distributed up the chain to policymakers at the White House. As a practical matter, this can sometimes mean an ODNI appointee giving directions to senior officers in other agencies— a more difficult, if not fruitless task, when veteran, experienced national intelligence officers are replaced by junior, lower ranking assistants.

“You think senior officers at the CIA are going to listen to some GS-13 or below telling him what to do?” said the ODNI source.

In short, the argument goes, these kinds of severe cuts undermine the whole purpose of the ODNI—which may ultimately be Pulse’s point, not to mention the ultimate goal of his patron in the White House.