Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton is quietly working to rehire employees who were dismissed during sweeping workforce cuts carried out under his fired predecessor, Bill Pulte, according to three people with knowledge of the matter, as NBC News reports.

“Clayton is asking some employees who had been let go to return to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence,” these people said, per NBC News. “They said the effort is so far focused on employees who had been detailed to the ODNI but were sent back to one of the 18 spy agencies the office oversees as part of the staff cuts.”

The rehiring push marks a striking reversal after a period of aggressive downsizing. Pulte had earned a reputation for “move fast and break things,” as one CNN reporter put it earlier this year — and he moved quickly to clean house on behalf of President Donald Trump.

Trump told reporters in June that he considered the Office of the Director of National Intelligence “unnecessary and or too big.”

“I’d like to see it smaller. I think there are a lot of people in there that shouldn’t be there,” Trump said, referring to employees who had served under the Joe Biden and Barack Obama administrations.

When the Wall Street Journal asked whether he wanted Pulte to begin firing people, Trump said he wanted him to “start the process.”

In practice, however, the office has proven more essential than Trump and Pulte initially treated it. The ODNI oversees 18 intelligence agencies, from the CIA to the NSA and others. It was created after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the investigative commission found that intelligence departments had failed to connect the dots between details each agency had separately discovered.

The ODNI relies heavily on employees who are detailed to the office from other intelligence agencies. That reliance makes detailees — the same group now at the center of Clayton’s rehiring outreach — central to the office’s core coordinating function, the reason it was created in the first place. During the major workforce downsizing led by former directors Tulsi Gabbard and Pulte, hundreds of employees were fired, offered early retirement or ordered to return to their home agencies, as NBC News reported.

According to NBC News, “The effort by Clayton to approach some former staff members about coming back suggests the new director is seeking to introduce a degree of stability to the ODNI after months of turmoil, including major personnel cutbacks, the firing of senior intelligence analysts and turf wars with the CIA and the FBI, according to current and former intelligence officials.” The network added that “During Gabbard’s tenure, the ODNI was often marginalized in administration discussions. She announced her resignation in May.”

The ODNI had a workforce of slightly more than 2,000 at the start of the Trump administration. It is now down to fewer than 1,000 employees, according to the people with knowledge of the matter — meaning the coordinating hub created after the Sept. 11 attacks to keep agencies from missing what each one separately discovers is now operating with less than half of its starting personnel. The sources did not know how many former employees have been approached by the ODNI about returning to the agency, and it remains unknown how many of those approached will ultimately return or whether the effort will eventually extend beyond detailees to other dismissed staff.