Trump’s Intelligence Purge — Bill Pulte, the ODNI Firings, and a Spy-World Civil War.

President Donald Trump (R) has handed the keys to the nation’s top intelligence office to a man with no intelligence background at all — and told him to tear it down. On June 2, 2026, Trump named Bill Pulte, the Federal Housing Finance Agency director who chairs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, acting Director of National Intelligence, replacing Trump’s outgoing DNI Tulsi Gabbard. Trump’s public instruction was blunt: execute “the immediate and needed downsizing” of the office.

Within days of formally taking the post, Pulte began firing. According to multiple news organizations citing people familiar with the matter, he terminated six staffers — including political appointees installed by Gabbard — reverted dozens of career officers to their home agencies, gutted senior ranks at the National Intelligence Council, and directed managers to draw up a list of hundreds of employees to cut at the National Counterterrorism Center. One source described it to CNN in four words: “the deep state firings have begun.”

To Trump’s allies, this is the drain-the-swamp promise made literal: a bloated post-9/11 bureaucracy finally pruned by a loyalist who won’t be captured by it. To critics — and not only Democrats — it is a reckless purge run by an unqualified political enforcer who spent the prior year mining mortgage records for dirt on the president’s enemies. This page lays out what is documented, what is contested, and who is saying what — sourced line by line.

• 6 fired — ODNI staffers Pulte terminated in his first days, including political appointees of former DNI Tulsi Gabbard · Source: CBS News; CNN
• 45 reverted — career officers Pulte sent back to their home agencies as part of the downsizing · Source: CBS News
• ~300–400 flagged — employees of the ~1,000-person National Counterterrorism Center managers were told to identify for cuts · Source: CNN (300); NBC News (400)
• 0 intel jobs — national-security or intelligence positions Pulte held before this appointment; the role's statute calls for 'extensive' experience · Source: NBC News; Fox News
• 4+ referrals — Democrats Pulte referred to DOJ from his FHFA perch over alleged mortgage fraud — Letitia James, Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell, Lisa Cook · Source: Mediaite; CNBC; The Hill
• GAO probe — the Government Accountability Office is investigating Pulte's use of FHFA authority against Trump opponents · Source: The Hill

Bill Pulte is the grandson of homebuilding magnate William Pulte and, before government, was best known as a philanthropist who gave away money to followers on social media — a self-styled online crusader with a large, combative X following. Trump made him director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the regulator over mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In announcing the intelligence job, Trump praised Pulte’s stewardship of “over $10 Trillion at Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac” and his experience “managing the most sensitive matters in America.”

Keep Reading

Politics · Supreme Court

Supreme Court Backs Trump on Asylum and TPS: What the 6-3 Rulings Actually Held

Read →

What made Pulte a household name in Washington, though, was something else: over the prior year he turned the FHFA into a referral machine aimed at the president’s opponents. Pulte publicly sent the Justice Department criminal referrals alleging mortgage fraud by New York Attorney General Letitia James (D), Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA), Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA), and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook — a step normally handled quietly by career investigators, not announced by a regulator on social media. The Government Accountability Office opened an investigation into whether he misused his authority; Swalwell sued him; and James’s resulting indictment was later dismissed by a federal judge. NBC News summed up the through-line in its headline: a “housing official who targeted Trump’s enemies” was now being named director of intelligence.

The opening came when DNI Tulsi Gabbard told Trump on May 22 that she would step down to support her husband following his diagnosis of a rare bone cancer; her resignation was set to take effect June 30. Rather than elevate a career intelligence veteran, Trump tapped Pulte to fill the seat in an acting capacity — while keeping his FHFA job. On Truth Social, Trump wrote that he had asked Pulte to “execute the immediate and needed downsizing of the office, reverting staff to their home agencies,” and, as Fox News reported, he described the Office of the Director of National Intelligence as having grown “unnecessary and/or too big.”

The ODNI was itself a post-9/11 creation, stood up in 2004 to knit together the 18 agencies of the U.S. intelligence community after the failures that preceded the attacks. Conservatives have long argued it became a redundant layer of overhead; Trump’s team cast the downsizing as overdue reform. Critics countered that gutting the coordinating office — and especially the National Counterterrorism Center beneath it — risks re-opening the very blind spots the ODNI was built to close.

Pulte arrived early and moved fast. Even before formally starting, CNN reported, he was eyeing cuts of roughly 300 of the National Counterterrorism Center’s some 1,000 employees; NBC News put the figure at 400. Once in the chair, the firings began on a Monday in late June. Per CBS News, Pulte terminated six staffers and reverted 45 career officers to their home agencies. CNN reported that those dismissed included political appointees close to Gabbard and dozens of career officials, and that more than 50 officers — among them a large share of the senior staff at the National Intelligence Council, which produces the government’s flagship analytic assessments — were pushed out.

Keep Reading

Politics · Housing

Mamdani Froze the Rent on a Million Apartments: What That Actually Does

Read →

Two details from the early days alarmed officials and lawmakers beyond the raw headcount. The first: the counterterrorism cuts. Former intelligence officials warned that thinning the NCTC — the hub built specifically to fuse terrorism threat data across agencies — could degrade the government’s ability to detect and disrupt plots. The second, reported by The Hill: in an early briefing Pulte asked whether he could take the President’s Daily Brief — among the most tightly controlled intelligence products in the government — home, a request that unsettled career staff.

What makes this more than a routine reorganization is who is objecting. The opposition is bipartisan. The top Democrats on the congressional intelligence committees — Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) and Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) — wrote to Pulte that a reduction in force is “not an appropriate course of action for anyone in an acting capacity,” and warned of his “willingness to misuse” his position “to pursue President Trump’s perceived political enemies.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called Pulte “a partisan thug with no experience in intelligence.”

The more striking criticism came from Trump’s own party. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) publicly tore into the firings and Pulte’s qualifications. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said whoever holds the role “must have the extensive national security experience required by statute,” and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), a former FBI agent, said flatly: “He’s got no background in intelligence.” That is the civil war — not merely the usual partisan split, but a fracture running through the national-security establishment and the Republican caucus alike over whether downsizing the intelligence office is reform or wreckage.

“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.”

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) and Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT), letter to Acting DNI Bill Pulte

The case for Pulte’s mandate is not nothing. The ODNI did balloon from a lean coordinating cell into a sprawling office, and good-faith reformers across both parties have argued for years that it duplicates work done elsewhere in the community. Allies frame the President’s Daily Brief flap and the firings as a new chief breaking a culture that resists civilian control — exactly the kind of entrenched bureaucracy that “drain the swamp” was meant to confront. Trump has since said Pulte will not be the permanent DNI, framing his tenure as a demolition phase before a confirmed successor.

Keep Reading

Politics · California

Inside Gavin Newsom's Wine Empire: What the Filings Actually Show

Read →

The risks are equally concrete, and they are why even some Republicans flinched. Putting a regulator with no intelligence training and an open GAO investigation in charge of the community’s 18 agencies invites the obvious worry: that the same instinct to weaponize databases against opponents could follow him into a building full of the nation’s deepest secrets. Cutting the National Counterterrorism Center carries a tangible national-security cost if the threat-fusion mission is weakened. And an acting official remaking the office by fiat, without Senate confirmation or consultation, raises a structural question about who actually controls the intelligence apparatus. None of those concerns is partisan invention; they are why the objection crossed party lines.

Strip away the labels and the load-bearing facts stand on their own. Trump installed a housing regulator with no intelligence experience — a man who spent the prior year referring the president’s opponents for prosecution and drew a GAO investigation for it — atop the office that coordinates all 18 U.S. intelligence agencies, and ordered him to shrink it. Pulte began firing within days, reached into the counterterrorism center, and asked to take the President’s Daily Brief home. Whether that is overdue reform or a dangerous purge is the argument now splitting Washington — and, unusually, splitting the Republican Party.

We will not pretend the verdict is settled. No finding has established that Pulte has abused intelligence access, and the case for trimming a bloated office is real. But a citizenry entitled to know who guards its secrets should weigh the full ledger: the qualifications, the prior conduct, the firings, the counterterrorism risk, and the bipartisan alarm. We’ll track the final headcount at the NCTC, any inspector-general or congressional findings, and who Trump ultimately names as the permanent Director of National Intelligence.

More From Civic Intelligence

Politics · SNAP

Obama-Appointed Judge Strikes Down Trump's SNAP Soda-and-Candy Ban in 5 States

In Aragon v. Rollins, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson (Obama, 2011) vacated USDA waivers that…

Politics · Texas

He Said He Could Make Prisons 'Obsolete.' Now He Wants Texas to Send Him to the Senate

In 2022, Texas Rep. James Talarico (D-TX) called to slash police and prison budgets, praised a…

Last updated June 26, 2026