NBC News (“Top intelligence agency begins mass firings under new Trump appointee, source says“):
President Donald Trump’s new acting director of national intelligence, Bill Pulte, began purging staff members at the office Monday, a source familiar with the matter confirmed to NBC News.
“The deep state firings have begun,” the source said.
[…]
Trump named Pulte the acting director this month and said on Truth Social that he had “asked him to execute the immediate and needed downsizing of the office, reverting staff to their home agencies.” Pulte, who has no background in national security matters, has been serving as head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
A separate source with knowledge of the matter told NBC News over the weekend that Pulte had ordered staff members to identify 400 employees to be fired from the National Counterterrorism Center, which is part of the U.S. intelligence community, in the coming weeks.
Pulte issued the instruction late Thursday — before he officially took over for outgoing Director Tulsi Gabbard, the source said. He started his new post Friday.
The potential cuts at the counterterrorism center are focused on an office set up after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to monitor terrorist threats and suspected militants and to pool information from across federal agencies. Former intelligence officials have said reductions at the counterterrorism center could jeopardize the government’s ability to detect and prevent terrorist plots.
In a letter to Pulte earlier Monday, the top Democrats on the congressional intelligence committees, Rep. Jim Himes D-Conn., and Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said they were “concerned by reports that you intend to fire or place on leave hundreds of Office of the Director of National Intelligence officers as soon as this week.”
“Making significant structural changes to ODNI, to include a reduction in force, is not an appropriate course of action for anyone in an acting capacity, let alone without consultation with Congress, and you should refrain from doing so,” their letter said.
[…]
Trump named Pulte to the nation’s top intelligence post after Gabbard announced she was stepping down for family reasons. Pulte was met with bipartisan concerns in Congress, in part because of his lack of national security experience.
Trump later said Pulte would not serve in the role permanently and announced he would nominate Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, instead, but then he hit the brakes on Clayton’s nomination hours before his Senate confirmation hearing.
While someone with zero national security experience serving as DNI strikes me as bizarre, Pulte’s appointment as Acting Director appears to technically comport with the Vacancies Act. While the clear intent of the law is for the deputy to fleet up until a new permanent Director can be confirmed by the Senate, it grants the President authority to have any Senate-confirmed individual to fill an Acting role for no more than 180 days. The FHFA director is Senate-confirmed.
I fully concur with Warner that a major restructuring of an agency should be done by a Senate-confired permanent Director in consultation with, in this case, the Congressional Intelligence committees. But, to the extent the actions are otherwise legal (a determination beyond my expertise), an Acting official has the full authority of the office.
It’s unclear from this report or an essentially identical one from CNN whether these individuals have actually been terminated or merely reassigned to the home agencies from which they were seconded. The former almost certainly violates the law, presuming they are government employees with career status rather than probationary employees or contractors.
I have no strong opinion on whether substantial reductions in the size of the National Counterterrorism Center are warranted. Certainly, that mission is a considerably smaller facet of our national security strategy than it was even a decade ago. But, to the extent that it’s motivated by political score-settling rather than a consideration of where best to employ our limited intelligence collection and analysis capacity, it’s highly problematic.
