The office had slightly less than 2,000 employees at the start of the Trump administration and now has around 1,500. The additional cut would bring the year's total reduction to about 35 percent.

In a press release, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said the changes would "reduce ODNI by over 40%" by Sept. 30 and "save taxpayers over $700 million per year."

Gabbard said ODNI, which was established after the September 11 attacks to lead the U.S. intelligence community, has “become bloated and inefficient, and the intelligence community is rife with abuse of power, unauthorized leaks of classified intelligence, and politicized weaponization of intelligence.” 

She also released a ODNI 2.0 "fact sheet" that laid out plans to eliminate or consolidate programs and components that have been deemed to be redundant or overly partisan. The plan includes “refocusing functions within the Foreign Malign Influence Center, the National Counterproliferation and Biosecurity Center, and the Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center, and integrating core functions and expertise from those offices into ODNI’s Mission Integration (MI) and the National Intelligence Council (NIC).”

The sheet said the External Research Council and its Strategic Futures Group will be shuttered because they “operated as hubs for injecting partisan priorities into intelligence products.”

Even before Gabbard announced the 2.0 plan, some top GOP lawmakers had already pushed to slim ODNI’s operations. 

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, introduced legislation in June to cap the office's full-time workforce at 650 and restructure or terminate some of its internal entities. 

In a statement on Wednesday, Cotton said the ODNI 2.0 restructuring will make the agency “a stronger and more effective national security tool for President Trump.”

Gabbard has moved to crack down on dissent across the IC, including announcing on Tuesday that she was revoking the security clearances of 37 current and former U.S. officials, saying without evidence that they had politicized their roles. 

In May, she fired two top officials on the National Intelligence Council in May after the intelligence body composed an assessment that contradicted Trump’s claims that Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro was overseeing the activities of a violent gang operating in the United States.

Last month, Gabbard issued a report that she said showed a contradiction between the IC's internal assessments and public statements about Russian interference. But in fact, the public statement matched the internal assessments.

President Donald Trump and his Republican allies have long criticized the U.S. intelligence community, particularly after it concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election on behalf of Trump. During his first term, he famously sided with Russia's Vladimir Putin against the IC at their 2018 meeting in Helsinki. He and allies have called the IC part of a "deep state" of entrenched bureaucrats working to undermine the administration’s priorities.

Nextgov's Edward Graham contributed to this report.

On Monday, Allvin announced his plans to retire after serving just two years as the service’s highest-ranking officer, typically a four-year job. No reason was given in the Air Force press release that contained his announcement. 

The first months of the second Trump administration have seen an unprecedented purge of senior military officers. In February, Hegseth fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Allvin’s vice chief, Gen. James Slife; the chief of naval operations; and the judge advocates general of the Army, Navy, and Air Force. Others removed later include the commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, the commander of NSA/U.S. Cyber Command, and the Pentagon’s representative to the NATO Military Committee.

But this time around, Hegseth did not play a role in the departure, according to an Air Force official.

Rather, the decision stemmed from a desire to move away from plans for a service-wide reorganization, an effort former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall had pushed. Ultimately, the effort, called “Reoptimizing for Great Power Competition,” was seen as something too tied to the last administration and a potential distraction while the service deals with bigger problems. 

The numerous reorganization initiatives were “more distracting than they are helpful” since the Air Force is struggling with all-time-low readiness rates and manning problems, according to one person familiar with the discussions.

For example, a hallmark of the reoptimization effort was to build “deployable combat wings” that would train and deploy together as one unit, while a separate garrison wing would handle core Air Force functions and maintain the military base.

But the service doesn’t have enough manpower or resources to divide up the wings at every location, one former defense official said, and senior commanders were more concerned with the readiness of their aging equipment and dwindling fleet sizes. 

Parts of the reorganization effort will likely get axed or altered once a new chief is picked. An Air Force spokesperson said that no final decisions have been made regarding the effort, and provided no timeline for a decision.

Allvin was informed last week that he would be asked to retire and as a trade-off he would be allowed to announce his retirement, the Washington Post reported Tuesday. In a press release, the service said he will continue to serve until a replacement is confirmed by the Senate.

A new chief has yet to be officially announced, but Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach is on the top of the list of contenders, Breaking Defense first reported and Defense One confirmed. Wilsbach served as head of Air Combat Command and commander of Pacific Air Forces. He stepped down from ACC on Aug. 11 and announced his intent to retire and hand over the reins to Gen. Adrian Spain.