President Trump has found a legal mechanism to finally gut the Obama-era bureaucrats who've been burrowed into America's intelligence agencies like termites in a beach house, and the best part is there's absolutely nothing they can do about it. Using the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, Trump installed Bill Pulte as Acting Director of National Intelligence — without needing a single Senate confirmation vote — and gave him one directive: clean house.
Years of complaining about the deep state, and it turns out the cheat code was in the rulebook the whole time.
Pulte, who was previously heading the Federal Housing Finance Agency, now oversees 18 intelligence agencies — including the CIA and the FBI — and controls nearly $100 billion in annual spending. That's not a typo. One man, appointed by Trump, no Senate Democrats required, sitting on top of the entire intelligence community with a mandate to start swinging the axe.
Trump didn't mince words about what he wants. "I'd like to see it smaller. I think there are a lot of people in there that shouldn't be there," he said. Then came the two words every entrenched bureaucrat in Langley has been dreading: "Start the process."
Music to our ears.
The move comes after former DNI Tulsi Gabbard resigned, creating the vacancy that Trump exploited with surgical precision. Under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, Trump can slot in an acting director without going through the confirmation circus that Democrats have weaponized for years. He told the Wall Street Journal the quiet part out loud: "Because, if he reduced the size, in conjunction with me, and in conjunction with possibly the person coming in, he can do a lot of the hard work."
Translation: Pulte does the firing, the eventual permanent nominee walks into a cleaned-up shop, and the Senate never gets to run interference. Brilliant.
Trump was remarkably candid about the advantage of having an acting director doing the heavy lifting. "You're less shackled. It sort of gives you more power, you know, for a somewhat limited period of time," he said. "Frankly, it might be good for him to shake it up before people come." And when asked about the scope? "I would say everything, he should look at everything and make a determination."
Everything. Not "a few redundant positions." Not "voluntary early retirement." Everything.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence isn't being shy about it either. An ODNI spokesman confirmed the mission: "We look forward to working with Mr. Pulte and President Trump on additional initiatives to advance savings and root out deep state bad actors." That's an official government spokesman using the phrase "deep state bad actors" in a press statement. We've come a long way from "there is no deep state."
For years, civil service protections have been the body armor shielding "faithful career public servants" who just happened to spend their entire careers undermining Republican presidents. They leaked to reporters. They slow-walked directives. They sandbagged policy from the inside. And they thought they were untouchable because firing a GS-15 requires roughly the same amount of paperwork as launching a space shuttle.
As reported by Lifezette, Trump found the workaround. You don't need to fire them one by one if you can restructure the entire agency out from under them. Pink slips for everyone who thought their Obama-era hiring date was a lifetime guarantee.
The bureaucrats who spent the last decade thinking they ran this country just found out they don't.
