The Director's Initiatives Group (DIG) was a task force inside the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced in April 2025. Its stated aims were to root out what Gabbard described as the politicization of intelligence and to review records for possible declassification. Its membership was kept secret, and members of Congress who asked for the identities of its staff were refused. Gabbard later said the group was "created as a temporary effort to surge resources" for high-priority projects.

The group's portfolio, as reported by Reuters and the journalist Seth Hettena, included the records of the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the origins of COVID-19, the anomalous health incidents known as Havana Syndrome, and the FBI's Trump–Russia investigation. It also worked on Gabbard's release of documents about the 2016 intelligence assessment of Russian election interference, whose conclusions she disputed, and on the revocation of 37 officials' security clearances. Senator Mark Warner said he suspected the group was pursuing a "witch hunt" against officers seen as disloyal to President Trump.

The DIG did not last long. According to a former member, its work paused in December 2025 after a dispute over a memo, and it was dissolved in January 2026; Gabbard told Reuters in February that she had wound it down and reassigned its staff within ODNI. Two sources told Reuters the decision followed missteps, including the group's handling of an allegation about the pipe bombs left near the national party headquarters before January 6, 2021, and the alleged exposure of an undercover CIA officer's name. ODNI denied any missteps and said it had a legal duty to pass along a whistleblower's allegation.

That former member, James Erdman III, a CIA senior operations officer assigned to the DIG, testified under subpoena before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on May 13, 2026, at a hearing on COVID-19 origins. By Hettena's account, Erdman testified that he led the group's investigations into COVID origins, Havana Syndrome and UFOs. He alleged that the "CIA illegally monitored the computer and phone usage" of DIG personnel, their investigations and their contact with whistleblowers. The CIA said he was "not appearing as a whistleblower," and on June 2 Senator Chuck Grassley asked the Intelligence Community Inspector General to review the allegations.

UAP whistleblowers and their advocates have described their own dealings with ODNI in that period. Host Matt Ford of The Good Trouble Show alleged in March 2026 that the DIG invited UAP whistleblowers into secure facilities at ODNI's Liberty Crossing headquarters and then used their statements against them, and on his show in August former national-security professional Matthew Brown described a failed protection briefing with ODNI officials and argued that official intake channels can be used to map witnesses. No UAP findings by the group have been published, so Erdman's testimony and those accounts remain the main public record of its UAP work.