Trump Praised the Man Tasked With Gutting U.S. Intelligence as 'Less Shackled.' That's the Whole Problem.

President Donald Trump told The Wall Street Journal on Friday that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the agency created so America’s spy services would actually talk to one another, is “unnecessary” or “too big,” and that he wants his new acting director to “start the process” of shrinking it. Then he went further. Comparing it to the cuts at the Department of Education, Trump said the intelligence office “should maybe even be terminated, and we’ll make that decision.”

There is a real argument buried in there, and it’s worth saying so up front. ODNI did grow into a sprawling layer of headquarters staff, and complaints that it became a bureaucracy on top of bureaucracies are older than this administration. But the way Trump wants it cut, through an acting director he praised as “less shackled” precisely because the Senate never confirmed him, is the part that should worry even people who want a leaner government. The target is debatable. The method isn’t a close call.

What ODNI is, and why it exists

The office didn’t appear out of nowhere. Congress created the director of national intelligence in the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, passed in direct response to the 9/11 Commission’s finding that the CIA, FBI and others held pieces of the plot but never assembled them. The whole point was coordination: one office sitting above 18 separate intelligence agencies and components, responsible for making sure warnings don’t die inside a single agency’s inbox.

That history matters because it defines what kind of thing ODNI is. It is not another spy shop duplicating the CIA’s work. It is the connective tissue: the office that runs the President’s Daily Brief, sets community-wide priorities, and is supposed to stop the “failure to connect the dots” that the 9/11 Commission described in those words. You can believe that connective tissue got too thick. It’s a different claim to say it’s “unnecessary.”

It’s also worth being precise about scale. ODNI is comparatively small next to the agencies it sits above. The CIA, the NSA, the FBI’s intelligence arm and the rest employ the analysts and run the collection; ODNI’s leverage comes from coordination, not headcount. Cutting it because it’s “too big” risks confusing the symptom with the function. And the function is the one piece of the architecture that exists specifically because the spy agencies, left to themselves, did not share what they knew.

The ‘less shackled’ tell

The most revealing part of Trump’s interview wasn’t the word “terminated.” It was his explanation of why an acting director is useful. Because Pulte hasn’t been confirmed by the Senate, Trump said, he is “less shackled,” and the arrangement “gives you more power, you know, for a somewhat limited period of time.”

Read that again. The entire purpose of Senate confirmation is to put a check on who gets to run the most sensitive agencies in the government. Trump is describing the absence of that check as an advantage: a window to act before anyone has to answer for it. That is not a throwaway line. It is the strategy.

Acting officials exist for continuity, to keep an office running between confirmed leaders. They are not meant to be the vehicle for permanent, hard-to-reverse decisions made precisely because the normal vetting got skipped. Treating an acting tenure as the moment to act because no one is positioned to stop you inverts the reason the role is temporary in the first place.

And consider who would be wielding that unshackled power. Trump installed Bill Pulte, the federal housing-finance regulator with no intelligence background, as acting director after Tulsi Gabbard resigned. CNN reported that Pulte didn’t even hold a security clearance before the appointment, and he is keeping his housing job while running the spy community part-time. This is the person Trump wants firing career analysts: fast, and before any permanent director faces a confirmation vote.

The honest counterargument

The strongest case for Trump here is that he’s not wrong about the size. Critics across both parties have argued for years that ODNI is bloated and duplicative, and the office itself has been shrinking: by an ODNI official’s own account, Gabbard had already cut staff by close to half under a program she branded “ODNI 2.0,” saving on the order of a billion dollars. If a 50 percent cut was defensible, why is going further automatically alarming?

Because the question was never just how much but how. A deliberate reform (led by a confirmed director, with a plan, congressional oversight, and someone accountable for what gets lost) is a legitimate exercise of executive power. A rushed purge run by an acting official who was told to move quickly while the Senate isn’t watching is something else. The difference between trimming fat and cutting into muscle is judgment, institutional memory, and the willingness to be held responsible for mistakes. Trump’s framing strips out all three on purpose.

Why the timing makes it worse

This is happening at the worst possible moment for the intelligence community to be leaderless and rattled. The same week Trump floated terminating ODNI, the Senate failed to advance a reauthorization of FISA Section 702, the warrantless-surveillance authority that intelligence agencies lean on heavily. The motion fell short, 47 to 52, with a bloc of Republicans, Rand Paul, Mike Lee and Josh Hawley among them, joining Democrats. Senator Mark Warner, the intelligence committee’s top Democrat, said there would be “more than enough” votes to renew the authority if Pulte weren’t sitting in the acting director’s chair. Section 702 expires June 12.

So at the precise moment surveillance authority is in limbo and the office has no confirmed leader, the president wants to start firing the people who run it. That isn’t reform sequenced for stability. It fits the administration’s broader pattern of reshaping the national-security state by subtraction: the same instinct behind scrapping the Justice Department’s weaponization review and reorienting counterterrorism resources toward the cartels. Each move is defensible in isolation. Stacked together, and executed by acting officials chosen for being “less shackled,” they describe a security apparatus being remade faster than anyone can be held to account for it.

A government is entitled to decide its intelligence bureaucracy is too big. What it cannot do is pretend that firing analysts through an unconfirmed official is the same thing as reforming the system. The first is a policy choice someone has to own. The second is the careful avoidance of having to own anything at all.