After a decade of enormous budget increases the American intelligence community’s budget will probably decline by billions of dollars, Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper said here.

Clapper told more than 3,000 people at the annual Geoint conference that the intelligence community’s budget had been handed in to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. “We are all going to have to give at the office,” Clapper said. The bulk of the cuts will come from accounts labeled information technology, he said.

The commitment to cut across the intelligence budget poses an important challenge for Clapper, as he made clear to the audience. The president told him, “this was a litmus test for the Office of National Intelligence.” After a decade of intelligence increases, which allowed all boats to rise, this is the first real test of the DNI’s ability and clout to control the fractious intelligence community which has historically resisted central control.