US President Donald Trump said Friday he wants his incoming acting spy chief to start firing employees, deepening the controversy over the appointment of a man with no previous intelligence experience.
Bill Pulte, a Trump loyalist who heads the Federal Housing Finance Agency, was named by the Republican president on Tuesday as acting Director of National Intelligence.
“If he cut, I wouldn’t mind that,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One, adding that the number of employees in Pulte’s office had been “way too high for way too long”.
Trump had earlier said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that he wanted Pulte – who will oversee the 18 sprawling US intelligence agencies – to slash employee numbers.
“I’d like to see it smaller. I think there are a lot of people in there that shouldn’t be there,” Trump told the newspaper, citing holdouts from the Biden and Obama administrations.
Democrats have condemned Pulte’s appointment to replace Tulsi Gabbard as intelligence chief, pointing to the loyalist’s history of weaponising government records against Trump’s opponents.
