President Donald Trump's current Director of National Intelligence (DNI), Jay Clayton, has reportedly spent much of his tenure unwinding projects and organizational changes carried out by his predecessor, Tulsi Gabbard.

Reporting by Julian E. Barnes, Dustin Volz and Robert Draper, published Tuesday in The New York Times, detailed how Clayton reversed several of Gabbard's undertakings after assuming the post. “As Mr. Clayton took his post from Bill Pulte, who served as the office's interim director after Ms. Gabbard's departure, a renovation was underway to replace the office of the official who oversees the president's daily intelligence briefing with a private dining room. Mr. Clayton stopped the work and ordered the office restored,” the journalists reported.

“He also ordered a halt to plans to create a firing range at Liberty Crossing, as the office's Virginia headquarters is known. It is not clear who had approved the firing range. Ms. Gabbard had not approved it and had looked skeptically on the proposal, according to people briefed on her work.”

The reporters added that another project — a small museum — was completed before Clayton arrived, and that he has allowed it to remain. Officials are divided over the museum's utility. Some considered it wasteful, given the existing museums at the Defense Intelligence Agency, the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency, while several people who have seen the new installation said the displays were well done. “While the museum passed the review, Mr. Clayton decided the costs of the dining room and the firing range could not be justified and were not central to the office's mission, according to officials.”

The trio also described how Clayton “effectively dismantled Ms. Gabbard's Director's Initiatives Group, the organization that led many of the office's efforts to declassify and release intelligence.”

Not all of Gabbard's controversial work, however, has been abandoned. Clayton has continued elements of it, notably the weaponization of the DNI's office to investigate elections, based on Trump's fixation on the claim that he won in 2020. Gabbard faced significant criticism during her tenure for the steps she took to accommodate Trump in this respect. The divide drawn in the report is therefore between projects Clayton judged unjustifiably expensive and peripheral to the office's mission, and the election-focused work that has outlasted the leadership change — a selective, rather than wholesale, unwinding that shows what the office's new director treats as central and what he treats as expendable.

“The parallel investigations into the 2020 election underscore the extent to which it has returned as a priority for the president,” The Guardian wrote in February. “And Gabbard being sent to the raid showed the interest on voting machine manipulation claims that Trump has cited as evidence the election was stolen. The review led by the office of the director of national intelligence (ODNI), authorized on the basis that it is assessing election integrity, has been focused for months on potential vulnerabilities in voting machines and the possibility of foreign interference.” As Clayton's tenure develops, those are the threads to track: whether the election reviews continue, and whether the office's declassification and release work — left without the group that led it — takes on a new form.