In today’s edition … Trump gets a series of Supreme Court wins … We ask you about 2026 megadonors … but first …
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Tulsi Gabbard made deep cuts to the intelligence community during her time as director of national intelligence. Her replacement has decided she didn’t go far enough.
Acting director of national intelligence Bill Pulte started firing and reshuffling intelligence staff this week, our colleagues Ellen Nakashima and Warren P. Strobel reported Thursday. Gabbard had already cut the staff of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence by 40 percent before she left, and Pulte is carrying out President Donald Trump’s request to cut back even further.
Trump’s administration also has plans to sharply reduce the size of the CIA, NSA and other intelligence agencies over several years.
It’s hard to tell exactly what the impact of these cuts will be, given the intelligence community’s opacity. But experts are concerned that the layoffs are indicative of a broader politicization of America’s intelligence agencies — and pose a threat to lawmakers’ ability to make informed decisions on national security matters.
“It’s absolutely critical that [lawmakers] have good intelligence and understand what they’re seeing,” said Elaine Kamarck, the director of the Center for Effective Public Management at the Brookings Institution. “They need this to determine budgets, they need this to determine force structures.”
“If you don’t have people who can interpret the massive amounts of data that our intelligence community gathers, it’s useless,” Kamarck said.
Gabbard’s tenure at ODNI was marked by accusations she had politicized the agency, using her platform to pursue Trump bugaboos, like 2020 election fraud claims and suggesting the 2016 federal investigation into ties between Russia and the Trump campaign was a “treasonous conspiracy.”
Pulte was arguably an even more controversial pick to run ODNI, given his lack of an intelligence background and reputation as an even stauncher Trump ally. The president appointed Pulte to serve as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency in March 2025, and Pulte quickly garnered attention for his willingness to accuse Trump’s political opponents of mortgage fraud.
“If you put people like that in charge, you don’t get better intelligence if you get scared analysts and confused allies and a president surrounded by people telling him what he wants to hear,” said John Sipher, a former CIA officer and nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.
Trump has long clashed with the intelligence agencies — particularly when their analysis is at odds with his aims — and he hasn’t allayed concerns that Pulte was brought in to be a political hatchet man, telling the Wall Street Journal earlier this month that ODNI officials who served in the Biden and Obama administrations “shouldn’t be there.”
Pulte’s critics say the perception that he is there to settle scores for Trump could discourage other countries from sharing intelligence and undermine American intelligence officers’ ability to cultivate sources abroad.
Sipher says America’s reputation as the shining city on the hill has historically attracted sources and spies frustrated with their own nations’ corruption and brutality.
“If we start to look like we’re just like other countries, you know we’re corrupt, we only take care of ourselves, we only use information to help ourselves … if it’s not a values-bred country, then people aren’t going to want to spy for us,” Sipher said. “The reason we are good is because we represent something good.”
The Supreme Court gave Donald Trump a string of wins Thursday — rulings that will reverberate throughout American society for years.
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The first, and possibly most consequential, is a wholesale change to the way the United States offers temporary humanitarian protections to people from war-torn, environmentally devastated or otherwise unsafe nations. The Court, our colleagues Julian Mark and Maria Sacchetti reported, ruled that the Trump administration “can cancel temporary humanitarian protections for Haitian and Syrian immigrants living legally in the United States.” The ruling could allow the government to deport hundreds of thousands of people starting this year, but could impact the 1.3 million immigrants with protected status from 17 countries.
That wasn’t the only immigration ruling in Trump’s favor. The court also ruled that migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border are not entitled to asylum until they are physically in the U.S., allowing immigration officials to turn back asylum seekers before they enter the country.
Then the court delivered a big win for gun rights advocates, striking down a law in Hawaii that sharply restricts where people can carry guns in public. The law, our colleague Justin Jouvenal reported, barred people from carrying firearms on private property open to the public without the owner’s consent. States like New York, New Jersey, California, and Maryland have similar laws, all of which will now be subject to legal scrutiny.
Taken together, it’s a string of wins for Trump from a legal body that he has been unafraid to criticize.
It could be a brief reprieve. Supreme Court watchers believe the court will rule against Trump’s desires on the future of birthright citizenship and in his bid to reshape the Federal Reserve.
San Antonio Current: San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones wants to cancel an upcoming show by Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West. But because of a lack of votes on the city council, the mayor wants to amend Ye’s contract to bar him from performing a song titled “Heil Hitler” and from selling swastika merchandise.
San Jose Spotlight: Lawmakers in the heart of Silicon Valley know where artificial intelligence is headed — and are demanding schools begin to prepare students for a future dominated by AI.
Miami Herald: The death toll after back-to-back earthquakes rocked Venezuela continues to climb. South Florida is home to the largest Venezuelan population in the U.S.
It appears that many of you use AI chatbots, but few use the products for political questions.
“I would never use an AI chatbot to ask a political question. It can be difficult enough just dealing with stuff that matters more. Like help finding a job in your situation or how to sell something or checking something out,” wrote Rick Prescott. “You can get statistical answers or scientific ones, but political stuff is just too, being nice here, smarmy.”
Desiree Bryant wrote about how she asked Copilot if Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) has endorsed Texas Senate candidate James Talarico. She has not, but Desiree wrote she “got a firm yes with a wild list of links to ‘news’ articles, including one reporting Kamala Harris endorsing him.”
“I admonished AI for not answering an unambiguous question accurately. Then, it replied that I was right — I had asked a straightforward question, and it had answered in error,” Desiree added. “AI just makes stuff up and if you don’t bother to read the linked articles to reliable news sources, you’d be misled or given a completely wrong answer.”
If you haven’t read Clara Ence Morse, Leslie Shapiro, Praveena Somasundaram and Eric Lau’s story on the megadonors pouring more than $1.3 billion into the 2026 election, you really should. But we wanted to ask you: Do you worry about the amount of money in politics? How would you fix it? And if you donate to campaigns, how do you feel about the money you give compared to that of these megadonors? Let us and your fellow Early Brief readers know at [email protected].
Thanks for reading. You can follow Dan and Matthew on X: @merica and @matthewichoi.
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