Tipsheet

DNI Director Bill Pulte Just Provided an Update on Layoffs and Election Security

Amy Curtis
Amy Curtis  |  July 28, 2026 9:15 AM

The Acting Director of National Intelligence, Bill Pulte, teased that some big news would drop this morning on X, and now we know what that big news is.

First, Pulte announced a fifth and "near final" round of terminations, an approximate 30 percent reduction in staff.

"The Intelligence Community must protect the American people, NOT the political whims of the bloated and corrupt elite class," he wrote on X.

Pulte also shared some more declassified information about China. While we know the Chinese hacked voter data, as President Trump spelled out July 16 primetime address, the documents released by Pulte show China had plans to use cyber operations to sway public opinion against the Trump administration and international opinion against the U.S. government.

The Chinese planned to "exploit U.S. societal fissures and vulnerabilities" to influence American voters and other audiences, as well as the decision-making process of the U.S. government. The topics the Chinese planned to use were wide-ranging and included exploiting racial tensions (e.g. white people hate black people, inciting race-based demonstrations and marches), USG tensions with the U.S. military, political disagreements, and women's rights.

"China had developed the capabilities to project themes on these topics onto social media (TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and others) as well as mainstream media through a variety of overt and hidden influencers and media contributors. One of the options included gathering information on senior U.S. government officials to influence public opinion of those officials," the document read.

Pulte shared other documents, including redacted messages where someone says he or she is "basically running a shadow government across the FBI at this point."

Pulte also shared more declassified documents from the National Intelligence Council about the vulnerabilities in the 2020 election infrastructure.

The document says that in addition to China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea have the capability to access and possibly manipulate data in U.S. election-related computer systems, but that "we do not know whether they have specific plans to interfere with the functioning of these systems."

The document also pointed out that centralized election-related data repositories are the most vulnerable. "These systems, which are used to collect, update, and store voter information, are designed for regular access, commonly through web portals, which makes them vulnerable to a range of malicious cyber activities," the document read.

The ballot and voting machine preparation process is also "vulnerable to cyber, supply chain, or insider threats. But the documents note that "security and mitigation measures used in these processes, and the distribution of voting machine storage facilities countrywide, would make it difficult for an adversary to coordinate a campaign to manipulate voting results an entire state or multiple states."

The document warned that "cyber operations targeting the electronic tabulation of results could delay results reporting from affected jurisdictions, potentially creating public uncertainty but not affecting the integrity of certified results."

To mitigate these threats, the document outlined four steps, including physical security and "cyber hygiene" (e.g., replacing obsolete equipment, strengthening password policy and audit processes, and implementing network segmentation), third-party vendor verification, public messaging and education, and messaging to adversaries.

Before and after President Trump's primetime address, the media said the President had no credibility on the issue, some networks refused to carry the address, and the fact-checkers ignored the facts. Now we have more documents and evidence about the risk to our elections—risks the Democrats once acknowledged, too—and a framework to address this going forward.