Gabbard Sets up DOGE-Style Team to Cut Costs, Uncover Intel ‘Weaponization’

The Washington Post

13:55 JST, April 9, 2025

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has established a new group to work on cost-cutting and investigate “weaponization” across the 18 spy agencies that her office oversees.

The Director’s Initiatives Group was established in line with President Donald Trump’s executive order to “bring about transparency and accountability” in the intelligence community, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in a news release Tuesday.

“We are already identifying wasteful spending in real time, streamlining outdated processes, reviewing documents for declassification, and leading ongoing efforts to root out abuses of power and politicization,” the ODNI said in the release.

The composition of the group and its level of access and clearance remain unclear. But one U.S. official familiar with the matter said the group is composed of up to 10 people from outside the agency, vetted by the White House. The official, like several others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.

Two weeks ago, Gabbard testified to Congress that the U.S. DOGE Service – the government cost-cutting arm overseen by tech billionaire Elon Musk – “has not been at ODNI.”

The Director’s Initiatives Group, or DIG, is not part of DOGE, but it is looking at ways to cut costs within the intelligence community, officials said. DIG members have been at ODNI headquarters in McLean, Virginia, since late February, one official said.

News of the initiative emerges as the Senate Intelligence Committee is scheduled to hold a confirmation hearing Wednesday for Aaron Lukas and Joseph Kent, who have been nominated as principal deputy director of national intelligence and head of the National Counterterrorism Center, respectively.

Lukas is a career government official who served as an aide to then-acting intelligence director Richard Grenell during the first Trump administration. While Lukas’s LinkedIn profile says he worked for the State Department, a financial disclosure form filed with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics says he has been a CIA officer since 2004. Kent is a former Special Operations and CIA officer who twice lost a bid for Congress. Both are serving informally as advisers to Gabbard as they prepare for confirmation, and Kent has accompanied Gabbard to the White House for briefings.

Both Gabbard and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, have said they want to trim ODNI, which has grown to about 2,000 people since its founding in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to coordinate intelligence sharing across the often-siloed U.S. spy agencies. Neither has publicly put forward reorganization plans.

While that effort might save money, much of the $106 billion annual U.S. spy budget pays for expensive satellites and other sophisticated collection platforms, as well as CIA case officers and analysts, who are likely to prove harder to cut without affecting intelligence operations. Details of U.S. intelligence budgets are classified.

So far, DIG has reviewed documents for potential declassification, including information related to covid-19 origins, the U.S. government investigation into Russian attempts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election – a probe known as Crossfire Hurricane – and Havana syndrome, according to the ODNI.

Gabbard’s focus on “weaponization” is just one of several moves that have unsettled some agency personnel, a number of whom have opted to take an offer to resign early but be paid through Sept. 30, a former official said. The offer is commonly referred to as the “Fork in the Road,” after a similar Office of Personnel Management offer under that title, which itself echoed a Musk effort to downsize Twitter after he bought the social media company in 2022.

At least 100 ODNI personnel have taken the offer, some of whom are taking advantage of an opportunity to retire early with full pension benefits, an official said.

But others, many with decades of service in the intelligence community, are leaving because they think the agency’s new leadership is compromised by Trump’s partisan politics, said two former officials.

That group numbers at least 45, according to one former official. “They don’t believe they can continue to carry out the core mission of keeping the nation safe, under these circumstances,” the former official said.

The departure last month of acting general counsel Tricia Wellman has rankled some long-serving employees. Three people familiar with the matter said she left after she provided legal advice that displeased Gabbard. Wellman, a national security lawyer who had served in the ODNI across multiple Democratic and Republican administrations, was advised to take a deferred resignation, the people said.

Asked for comment, an ODNI official said Wellman’s departure had nothing to do with her legal advice. “Tricia Wellman failed to deliver on her responsibilities as Acting General Counsel on numerous occasions,” said the official. “She could have remained in her position as a deputy to the new Acting General Counsel, but she chose instead to take the Deferred Resignation Program and to combine it with Voluntary Early Retirement.”

Career officials at the ODNI have expressed concerns that Gabbard is fundamentally skeptical of the intelligence community and the analysis it provides the president.

Before joining the Trump administration, Gabbard routinely criticized U.S. intelligence agencies, implying that they were politicized. She questioned U.S. spy agencies’ assessment of chemical weapons use by the regime of then-Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and at times she appeared to echo Russian talking points about the roots of the war in Ukraine.

“People aren’t skeptical of her because she’s calling for more efficiency in the structure,” the second former official said. “They’re skeptical of her over what positions she has taken over many years now.”

The tumult within the intelligence community has reached beyond the ODNI.

Last week, Trump fired Gen. Timothy Haugh, the director of the National Security Agency, and his deputy, along with a slew of officials on the White House National Security Council staff, for apparently political purposes. The dismissals came after Trump met with a far-right activist, Laura Loomer, who accused the officials of political disloyalty.

In recent days, the administration also fired a top Navy admiral assigned to NATO headquarters in Brussels. Vice Adm. Shoshana Chatfield, the U.S. military representative to the NATO Military Committee, was notified of her removal over the weekend, three officials said.

On Friday, also as a result of a Trump order, Walter Weiss, the chief technology officer in the Pentagon’s Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, was notified that he was being removed from his position, according to five current and former U.S. officials. As with all the dismissals, no official reason was given for Weiss’s firing, which was previously unreported. A Pentagon spokeswoman said the department does not comment on personnel matters.