ODNI Faces Scrutiny Amid Political Appointments and Turmoil

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence faces scrutiny amid political appointments and turmoil. President Trump's selections have raised concerns about expertise and politicization of intelligence powers. Previous Directors highlight the ODNI's creation after intelligence failures and its role in information sharing. Debates continue regarding the ODNI's size and its directive versus cooperative authority. A strong, apolitical ODNI is deemed essential for navigating a dangerous global landscape.

As the White House keeps roiling the topmost organization in the American espionage hierarchy, questions have resurfaced that are as old — 25 years — as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence itself.

Do we need it all, or could we get rid of it? Should it be large or small? Should it be superior or auxiliary to the 18 other spy agencies of the United States? And how exactly can we assure that any Director of National Intelligence doesn’t deploy the office’s prodigious snooping powers to play politics instead of saving American lives by foreseeing the next national-security disaster?

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The ongoing turmoil at ODNI is the inevitable consequence of Donald Trump’s approach to the intelligence community. Especially in his second term, the president has chosen people to serve as DNI who are blatantly unqualified in terms of national-security expertise but who seem willing if not eager to wield their power to indulge Trump’s personal grievances and obsessions.

First came Tulsi Gabbard. She prided herself on shrinking the ODNI by about 40% — it now has a bit over 1,000 staff. (The exact number is woolly, because many people are at ODNI on secondment from other agencies.) She also pressured experts to confirm rather than challenge Trump’s biases, firing analysts who contravened the president’s assumptions about Venezuela, for example. And she diverted scarce resources to indulge Trump’s conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election, joining an FBI raid at an election center near Atlanta. She recently left for personal reasons.

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Next, Trump appointed somebody even less qualified and more toadying: Bill Pulte. He’s a MAGA blowhard on social media who has used his other roles in the administration, as head of the housing and mortgage agencies, to hurl frivolous charges of mortgage fraud at Trump’s political enemies. As an acting (meaning interim) DNI, Pulte doesn’t need Senate confirmation, which he wouldn’t get, since even Republicans are aghast at his selection.

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Even so, Pulte is now using his limited time to do Trump’s bidding. He’s already pushed out dozens more experts, including heavyweights such as Andrew Byers and Will Ruger, whose roles included running the National Intelligence Council, a body meant to distill the insights of all 18 agencies. Trump has lauded Pulte as “a very smart guy, and he may find out some things about the rigged elections.” Pulte may take the hint and selectively declassify documents to build the narrative about 2020 that suits his boss.

Next in line is Jay Clayton, who has to be confirmed by the Senate to succeed Pulte. He, too, lacks national-security qualifications. But as a former securities lawyer, and now a high-profile prosecutor, he looks, at least relative to Pulte, tolerable to Republicans in Congress. That said, Trump has comingled Clayton’s confirmation process with other legislative business, so his estimated time of arrival is unclear.

One thing these appointments show is Trump’s disdain for the ODNI, which he considers a prime example of the “deep state” that, in his mind, held him back in his first term and now needs to be either tamed or dismantled.

But the successive cuts also rhyme with a preexisting critique on the political right, which has viewed this capstone on the intelligence community as an unnecessary and wasteful bureaucratic layer. Tom Cotton, the Republican chair of the Senate committee on intelligence, wants to cull the ODNI to a staff of about 650 — small enough, as it’s been said in other contexts, to be drowned in the bathtub.

I ran these critiques, and the current upheaval, past some previous DNIs. John Negroponte, who became the first DNI in 2005, told me that the act of Congress that created ODNI in 2004 and the guidance he received from then-President George W. Bush were responses to the twin intelligence “fiascos” of the day: first, the terrorist attack on Sep. 11, 2001, and then the flawed assumption that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, which turned out not to exist. (Negroponte well remembers the futile search for them, because he was ambassador to Iraq when Bush picked him to be DNI.)

The lesson Congress took from 9/11 was that the attacks might have been prevented if only the various agencies, which sat on discrete dollops of information, had shared and connected their intelligence. So an additional office, the ODNI, was needed to break down the bureaucratic barriers, since the CIA director, who was at the time meant to play that role, was evidently not institutionally agnostic enough.

And the upshot of the WMD fiasco, Negroponte told me, was “hey, don’t let this happen again. Don’t you go and approve intelligence that is so off the mark that it becomes a national embarrassment.”

How well the ODNI over the next two decades lived up to these mandates is something of a Rorschach test. Dennis Blair, who was DNI during the administration of Barack Obama, told me that the whole intelligence community was so traumatized by 9/11 that information-sharing about terrorist threats became so abundant that analysts were smothered by information overload. But with respect to other threats — from North Korea to Iran, China, Russia and so forth — the agencies still protected their turfs.

“The structure was cooperative, not directive,” Blair told me, so “you need somebody like the DNI to say, nope, sorry, this is a national priority. We want you to keep working on it.” This line of thought suggests that the design flaw of the ODNI has always been that it has too little, rather than too much, power. But others, Blair told me, were already spreading the counternarrative that “your organization’s big and bloated,” which he attributes to “CIA influence operations.”

I am usually in favor of uncluttering bureaucratic messes — subtracting layers tends to be harder but also better than adding them. So I asked Blair why we couldn’t just get rid of the ODNI.

But then who would those 18 other organizations report to, he countered rhetorically — the president? In practice, the DNI’s function would revert to CIA directors. But they already proved in the days before 9/11 that they didn’t have the “bandwidth.”

All told, Blair thinks that the institution of the ODNI isn’t just good for America, but should be adopted by other countries, from Britain to Israel, which typically separate the functions of collecting and analyzing intelligence, and then have relatively junior officials report to their prime ministers.

The problem with giving more power to a DNI, of course, is that it also raises the risk of abuse if an administration politicizes and weaponizes the office, as Trump is doing (and as he accuses the Biden and Obama administrations of doing first).

That potential always exists. But it wouldn’t disappear with abolition of the ODNI. Americans worried that their spy agencies could morph into a secret police even before the FBI and CIA were created. The answer, then as now, is to instill an uncompromising culture of professionalism and integrity in the spy corps.

The Trump administration is going in the opposite direction. The cost of “having these ignorant, inexperienced, non-serious people put in charge” is the risk of missing a big threat, Blair told me; “I just feel it’s slipping away, and I just hope it doesn’t take another 9/11 in some other area” to realize for the second time why a proper spy boss is needed.

Negroponte emphasizes that it’s up to the president and Congress to have the spy agencies they want, but takes umbrage that the Trump administration has “almost intentionally set the ODNI up for failure” by appointing unqualified people and treating “intelligence as a plaything, like a little toy.” If the president, or Tom Cotton, the head of the CIA or anybody else, wants to get rid of the ODNI, he says, “well, then, why don’t you step up and go to Congress, and see if you can get it abolished?”

In a perfect world, that public debate is exactly what America would now get. And at the end of it, the nation may conclude that it needs a powerful, professional and apolitical ODNI more than ever. North Korea, China and others are building more nukes; Russia has threatened to use them; Iran (more than ever) and others would love to have their own. This world is much too dangerous to survive without good, clean intelligence.

(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this column are that of the writer. The facts and opinions expressed here do not reflect the views of www.economictimes.com.)