Last week, when President Donald Trump was about to nominate Bill Pulte, the head of his housing-finance authority, to be director of national intelligence, some Republican senators proposed abolishing the DNI office rather than vote down such a clearly unqualified candidate and thereby arouse Trump’s vindictiveness.
Many were relieved when Trump withdrew Pulte’s name and instead nominated Jay Clayton, a former SEC commissioner who is now the U.S. prosecutor for the Southern District of New York. Clayton may be in some respects a more serious choice, but the law creating the office back in 2004 required that the director have “extensive national security expertise”—something Clayton lacks as well. And so, some still mull just scuttling the agency.
Is this a good idea? The office was created in the wake of the 9/11 attack, when a commission concluded that the terrorists succeeded in part because U.S. intelligence agencies weren’t communicating with one another and thus couldn’t “connect the dots” that would have allowed them to see a complete picture of al-Qaida’s plot. The DNI’s office, or ODNI, would coordinate the agencies—all 18 of them—to avoid similar mistakes in the future.
How’s that worked out the past 22 years? Has the office served its purpose, or has it lingered one bureaucracy layered on top of a bunch of other bureaucracies, as some critics foresaw? What would happen if ODNI were abolished and the CIA once again become, as its initials indicate, the Central Intelligence Agency?
I have followed the agency and talked with some of its directors and analysts ever since it was created. In the past week, I’ve interviewed (on a background basis) some of its former senior officials from Democratic and Republican administrations, as well as some close observers. And I’ve concluded that, while far from perfect, ODNI has performed its tasks well and that abolishing it would be a serious mistake.
First, without the DNI, the intel agencies would once again be unable to “connect the dots”—which, as one former senior official told me, “is even more important now than it was on 9/11,” given the added complexities brought on by globalization since then. The CIA can’t do it; in fact, the CIA never wanted to share its intel. Nor would anyone have the authority to demand that, for instance, the FBI share information with the Department of Homeland Security.
Second, the agencies on their own tend to collect intelligence that addresses their own needs. Nine of these agencies are within the Defense Department, so they focus mainly on the tactical needs of warfighters, not on broad national interests.
Third, to the extent intel agencies do focus on similar issues, they sometimes disagree, and the DNI is seen—at least theoretically—as an “honest broker” that can pull together the conflicting views and explain where and why they differ. Having all this information in one place is especially vital for Cabinet secretaries and White House aides who make decisions on the National Security Council. (At least this has been true in administrations that value intelligence information.)
Fourth, the DNI can set common standards for intelligence collection and analysis. For example, in the old days, the National Security Agency (which intercepts foreign communications) refused to share some data with the CIA and other agencies because the special rooms where they stored highly classified materials didn’t meet the NSA’s standards for shielding from electronic penetration. Early on, the DNI assembled technicians from all the agencies to set common standards.
Fifth, the DNI can set priorities for technical innovations that the other agencies can’t do on their own, at least not without creating a dozen or more different approaches, spawning duplication, unfilled gaps, or both. The DNI has been doing this with the merging of intelligence assets with A.I., according to knowledgeable sources.
If ODNI didn’t exist, other agencies could theoretically take up the slack. For instance, in 2008, his final year in office, President George W. Bush issued an order giving ODNI the job of assembling the President’s Daily Brief. The CIA had done this job in the past and could resume doing it if ODNI were abolished. But it wouldn’t have—or perhaps even seek—the same access to all-agency intelligence, and it would tend to value its own analyses over those of competing agencies. (In fact, Bush gave ODNI this job because the CIA’s daily briefs on the Iraq war were so clearly designed to reinforce his own prejudices and thus polish the CIA’s image in his eyes.) Bush also made ODNI the liaison with foreign intelligence agencies. Again, the CIA could resume doing this, but it tends to focus more on operations these days—and foreign governments might view its briefings as tilted or part of a propaganda effort. In the fall of 2001, when the CIA, NSA, and defense intelligence agencies all agreed that Russia was preparing to invade Ukraine, President Joe Biden sent his DNI to brief the allies. Some believed the briefing, some didn’t, but they all saw the data and the reasoning behind the analysis.
Some of ODNI’s critics, notably Tom Cotton, the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, charge that the office often pursues its own agendas rather than simply coordinating the views of the other agencies and that, as a result, it’s become bloated.
Defenders, including some former officials, agree that, over the years, ODNI has taken the initiative on some issues rather than simply coordinate, but this is usually because it’s been handed missions that the other agencies don’t want.
However, it is not true that ODNI is bloated. Its precise number of employees is classified (for reasons nobody understands), but I’m told by two former officials, who still have inside contacts, that the number is around 1,500—and that, in the year-and-a-half since Trump’s return to the White House, the number has been slashed to about 800.
In the past, many ODNI officials have been on loan from other intel agencies—a good idea, as the officials return to their agencies with a broader perspective. (The NSC works the same way, with officials cycled in from State, Defense, and other departments.) Trump and his current DNI, Tulsi Gabbard, who recently announced her resignation to spend more time with her ailing husband, ended this practice, and the empty slots weren’t filled. Many other officials quit, or were fired, and their desks remained empty as well.
Even agency defenders acknowledge that some branches of the agency probably grew too large. For instance, until recently, the National Counterterrorism Center, which was formed at the height of the global war on terror, made up about 40 percent of the ODNI staff. But now, only three of its 15 senior officials remain—and that’s probably too few.
In some respects, the post-9/11 reforms didn’t make ODNI strong enough. Back in 1992, almost a decade before the twin towers attack, the House Armed Services Committee and Senate Intelligence Committee passed a bill creating a supra-agency with the power to set programs, personnel, and budgets for the entire intelligence community. Dick Cheney, who was President George H.W. Bush’s secretary of defense at the time, wrote the two chairmen letters (which were later made public), protesting that the “severely flawed” change would drastically reduce his authority and undermine the long-standing arrangements between the Pentagon and the CIA. At the time, DOD controlled about 80 percent of the intelligence community’s budget, all of it highly classified, amounting to an estimated $30 billion. The chairmen agreed and backed off.
If Cheney hadn’t protested, or if the two chairmen had held their ground, it’s possible that 9/11 would not have happened—though it’s equally possible that civil war would have broken out inside the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies.
In any case, when 9/11 did happen, Cheney was vice president to Bush’s son, George W.—which may explain why the DNI, as actually created, was less powerful than the “intelligence czar” that a reform commission proposed. (Bush Jr. asked Robert Gates, who had been his father’s CIA director, to become the DNI. When Gates realized that the job would give him no authority to hire, fire, or set budgets, he turned the offer down. He later became defense secretary.)
Over the years, ODNI has assumed responsibilities—and, in effect, powers—that were taken on less by statute than by default. This is why the original law required the DNI to have “extensive national security experience.” (There is no such requirement for secretary of state or defense or any other Cabinet position.) It takes extensive experience for the director of national intelligence to detect the gaps and opportunities in the surrounding intelligence bureaucracy and to figure out what he or she needs to do.
Bill Pulte would have had no idea what to do—and no time to figure things out, as Trump planned to keep him on as housing finance director as well. Trump is among the Republicans who endorse downsizing or eliminating ODNI, and Pulte would have made an all-too-ideal executioner, to the point where even Republicans pushed back, in part because Senate Democrats said they wouldn’t extend a surveillance law, which was about to expire, if Pulte were confirmed.
As it turned out, Congress went on recess before extending the law, which has now expired. (Loopholes, however, allow it to stay in force for a while longer.) Meanwhile, Pulte will still step in as acting DNI on Friday, when Gabbard steps down. (He is allowed to do this because the Senate confirmed him for the housing job that he currently has.)
Democrats virulently opposed Pulte as the DNI not only because he was manifestly unqualified for the job, but also because he has been one of Trump’s more notorious hatchet men in his housing job (he played a role in the indictment of Trump critics for allegedly violating mortgage laws—indictments that grand juries rejected), and they feared he would use surveillance laws to go after Trump’s critics as well.
Though Jay Clayton is a more polished figure, a well-heeled corporate lawyer, he too has sometimes kowtowed to Trump in his current job as Manhattan prosecutor—and, in any case, he has no more national-security expertise than Pulte.
ODNI is only as able as the people who work there and only as powerful as the president wants it to be. By those measures, even if it’s not abolished, it is on the decline—and so is the U.S. intelligence community as a consequence.
