President Donald Trump’s choice to run the nation’s premier intelligence office has won Senate confirmation, capping a turbulent and closely watched approval fight.
Jay Clayton, Trump’s nominee for Director of National Intelligence, was confirmed by the Senate on Tuesday night.
The vote broke along party lines, with senators approving him 51–47.
Clayton’s confirmation brings an end to Bill Pulte’s brief but chaotic period in charge of the agency.
Since Pulte took over last month at Trump’s direction, dozens of intelligence officials have reportedly been removed from their posts.
The upheaval has rattled the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which has about 1,800 federal employees, with many staffers reportedly worried they could be next in line for cuts.
“As of this evening, we just finished a fourth round of thoughtful, measured layoffs,” Pulte wrote Sunday evening on X.
Pulte said he had been “reducing the size of ODNI” since the president named him acting director of national intelligence, a role that gave him oversight of 18 federal agencies.
Jay Clayton was confirmed to the job of Director of National Intelligence in a party-line vote on Tuesday
Trump’s first DNI Tulsi Gabbard stepped away from the role earlier this year to support her husband in his cancer fight
The urgency behind Clayton’s confirmation is not manufactured. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, one of Washington’s most valuable spying authorities, lapsed in the middle of June and has now been dead for more than a month.
Lawmakers in both parties say they want a confirmed, credentialed director of national intelligence in the chair before they restore it, and Democrats have refused to move on reauthorization while Pulte runs the agency.
That is the price of a delay Trump created himself.
Clayton, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York and a former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, had been sailing toward an easy, bipartisan confirmation.
Senators in both parties were eager to be rid of acting spy chief Bill Pulte, who has no intelligence background.
Then, in a pre-dawn Truth Social post in June, the President torpedoed his own nominee and threw Capitol Hill into chaos.
Trump abruptly canceled the hearing, vowed to keep Pulte in place and refused to let the nomination advance until a string of unrelated demands were met, among them the confirmation of Jamie McDonald as US Attorney and passage of the SAVE America Act, his voter-ID bill.
‘We are canceling the Senate Hearing RE: DNI today, and will not be going forward until Jamie McDonald is approved to be U.S. Attorney,’ Trump wrote at the time. ‘In the meantime, Bill Pulte will remain as the Acting Director of National Intelligence.’
Clayton did not take his seat before the Senate Intelligence Committee until earlier this month, roughly a month later.
The stunt drew a pointed rebuke from the committee’s ranking member, Senator Mark Warner, who used his opening statement to needle the President.
Warner said he could not recall another nominee senators had agreed, on a bipartisan basis, to ‘move heaven and earth’ to confirm quickly, only for the president to yank the hearing and, in the process, blow up the FISA authorization.
‘I know you had nothing to do with that,’ Warner told Clayton. ‘So I guess congratulations about getting finally in front of this committee.’
Now Warner is signaling that even though Clayton is not his preference for the job, at least he’s not Pulte.
‘I’m not supporting Mr. Clayton, but it’ll be a vast improvement,’ Warner told NOTUS.
FISA requires 60 votes, meaning that some number of Democrats are needed for reauthorization.
