From sixteen employees to twenty thousand
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Handed the news that the Director of National Intelligence had announced an overhaul cutting more than forty per cent of her department's staff, Kiriakou's response was to supply the arithmetic he had used on another podcast the same day. 

The numbers

When the ODNI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, was first created, Kiriakou says, it had sixteen employees. It now has twenty thousand. 

His conclusion follows directly from the comparison: "So yeah, they need to cut staff." 

The original purpose

Kiriakou accepts his co-host's framing of the office's origin, that the idea was post-9/11, and was meant to produce more coordination between the agencies. He adds the qualifier that most interests him: "especially as it related to the budget." 

That is the standard justification for the office, and Kiriakou does not dispute it. What he disputes is that the resulting body still resembles the thing that was authorised. A coordinating staff of sixteen and a bureaucracy of twenty thousand are, on his account, different institutions with the same name.

His explanation for the difference is short and general: "bureaucracy grows and grows and grows." 

The position it puts him in

The endorsement is notable for who is being endorsed. Kiriakou is a persistent critic of the intelligence community and of this administration, and elsewhere in the same broadcast is scathing about both. Here he lines up behind a cut announced by the sitting Director of National Intelligence, on grounds that have nothing to do with her politics and everything to do with the ratio between an office's founding size and its present one. 

He closes the segment by saying he will "figure out how to take that DNI comment offline somehow", a remark he leaves unexplained. 

See also

- Tulsi Gabbard
- Central Intelligence Agency
- The Thirty Seven Analysts
