On Jan. 20, President-elect Donald Trump will reenter the White House with a once-in-a-generation mandate to reform our bloated federal bureaucracy. No part of Washington needs reform more urgently than the Intelligence Community (IC). Today, the IC is broken. But if Trump wishes to remake the IC, rendering it more effective while getting it out of partisan politics, there’s a way to do so successfully.
First, Trump should implement payback smartly. Trump, who holds grudges, wants to settle scores with the IC after its mistreatment of him during his last term in office. He’s right to feel as he does. In a manner that was unprecedented in American history, some intelligence bosses colluded with Democrats to smear Trump as a Russian pawn. This culminated in the infamous collaboration between IC bigwigs (mostly retired), Democrats, and tech moguls, to suppress discussion of Hunter Biden’s notorious laptop on the eve of the 2020 election.
Now that he’s back in power, Trump will want to punish the 51 former intelligence officers who suggested that Hunter’s laptop was the product of Russian intelligence service agitprop. What would be an appropriate response? Trump could yank the 51 individuals’ security clearances. That would effectively toss them off the lucrative consulting/contractor gravy train that most retired IC bigwigs enjoy. This would make it clear that IC senior officials — the equivalent of military general officers — cannot play partisan politics while remaining affiliated with the IC in any way. This should apply to everyone in the IC, regardless of party.
But Trump is also inheriting an IC that’s been ruled by Democrats for 12 of the past 16 years. And it shows. President Barack Obama’s cadres, who largely ran the White House under Joe Biden, must be purged. They have “their” people in leadership positions throughout our spy agencies. Everybody in the IC knows who they are. Tell every one of them that their services are no longer required. Start fresh, there are plenty of talented, nonpartisan intelligence officers ready to take their places. All this can be done without Congress. It should be done quickly.
Congress will be needed for big reforms, however. Above all, Congress is needed to fix our deeply broken counterintelligence system. Counterintelligence has always been the red-headed stepchild of American intelligence, and it’s gotten worse during the Obama and Biden administrations. Democrats abandoned basic counterintelligence, allowing Iranian agents to occupy top national security positions in Washington. They’ve also let Chinese spies run rampant, hacking the nation’s IT systems, including millions of phones (among them, Trump’s). This must stop. The stakes have never been higher. We are losing the “Spy War” to China, which means we are on track to losing a shooting war with Beijing.
What America lacks is a unified counterintelligence (CI) system. There’s a notional IC focal point, the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, but it has no real authority. NCSC is so unimportant that it took Biden two-and-a-half years to appoint a director. Our lead CI agency is the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which is the core problem. The FBI’s culture is law enforcement, cop work, not countering foreign espionage. The FBI, which holds the CI portfolio due to inertia not ability, lacks the strategic vision and acumen to lead U.S. counterintelligence.
There’s a civil liberties issue too. America is one of the world’s few law-based democracies to combine law enforcement and counterintelligence. Nearly all our allies separate them, by design. In Britain, CI is handled by the Security Service, popularly known as MI5, while the law enforcement side, when a spy needs to be arrested, is performed by the Metropolitan Police’s Counter-Terrorism Command. This system is mirrored in Australia and Canada, plus most of our allies. Combining law enforcement and spy-catching grants far too much power to the FBI, which proved partisan and corrupted during Trump’s last term.
The FBI needs deep reform, but taking away its CI mission is the fastest way to get there. Let the Bureau focus on catching bank robbers, serial killers, corrupt politicians, high-level fraudsters, and pedophiles, it’s what they’re very good at. But remove the FBI’s national security mission entirely. Create a national domestic intelligence agency, spies not cops, to handle counterespionage and counterterrorism inside the United States. That reforms the FBI and protects civil liberties, while establishing a bureaucratically empowered agency to manage CI across the IC. That’s how to protect America from the rising threat of foreign espionage, while keeping the spooks out of politics.
Canada did exactly this 40 years ago, removing the national security mission (except for effecting arrests when needed) from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, following several political scandals, then handing it to a new, civilian counterspy agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. Claims that doing the same in Washington would be “too hard” or “unmanageable” are excuses for inaction.
Fixing our spy bureaucracy also requires slimming down the IC’s leadership, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. This setup was created by Congress after 9/11, to improve IC management and coordination. Mostly, it just created a lot of cushy staff jobs. There’s no point in getting rid of the ODNI, we’re stuck with it, but its personnel should be cut in half.
The current Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, is an Obama-Biden flunky. She has consistently placed politics above honesty and integrity. She and all her Democrat retinue at ODNI must be shown the door immediately. Under Haines, the DNI mysteriously could find no connection between Chinese labs and the origins of the COVID-19 virus, nor could it detect any foreign ties to the hundreds of attacks on American spies and diplomats worldwide called “Havana Syndrome.” These were blatant lies to cover for the Obama and Biden administrations, which shattered trust between American spies and their leaders.
There will be calls to radically reform the Central Intelligence Agency. Certainly, Langley needs a shake-up. The CIA also has many Obama-Biden partisan appointees holding top jobs who need to go. But with former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe now nominated for the Director’s job, there is Trump can take appropriate remedial action via someone who can win the respect of the workforce. It’s worth considering slimming down the CIA’s Directorate of Analysis to shed uninspired analysts. In an ideal world, this directorate should be disbanded, with the ODNI-level analysis mission given to an interagency staff of spies on assignment from all IC agencies, akin to Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee. That may be too much to ask Congress to accomplish quickly.
The jewel in the crown of American espionage is the National Security Agency (full disclosure I served as an NSA officer). The NSA produces the lion’s share of the IC’s actionable intelligence. Here, too, there needs to be a purge of Obama-Biden appointees, though much less than at CIA or ODNI. The main challenge is that NSA’s director, a four-star general or admiral, is also commander of the Pentagon’s Cyber Command. This dual-hatted arrangement isn’t ideal. Congress has looked at separating NSA and CYBERCOM, but nobody has figured out how to do that without creating more bureaucracy and confusion. It’s probably best to keep things at Fort Meade as they are.
Our spy agencies need force reductions, broadly speaking. There’s enormous duplication and triplication of effort among the IC’s 17 agencies. If Elon Musk is charged with slimming down the federal bureaucracy, be sure to include the IC in his assessment. But the IC can’t stop hiring, which is what the IC habitually does when it’s ordered to tighten its belt. We desperately need young people with fresh ideas in our spy agencies.
What else deserves attention?
For one, do we really need the Defense Intelligence Agency? It’s never been a beacon of competence (per the venerable inside joke: CIA stands for Christians In Action, NSA means No Such Agency, while DIA equals Do It Again). Its mission of providing intelligence to the Joint Chiefs of Staff is important, but that hardly requires a stand-alone agency with all that overhead. Everything else DIA does can be handled by other IC agencies. Drastically reduce DIA or, better yet, shut it down.
Ultimately, the key factor in intelligence, like most things, comes down to personnel. The IC needs to recruit and retain talent to succeed. It requires leaders who are accountable to the workforce, honest, incorrupt, and above politics. The DEI propaganda that has infected the whole federal government has taken root inside the IC as well. It’s pernicious partisan agitprop that harms the effectiveness of our spy agencies while lowering morale. Ditch it immediately.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM RESTORING AMERICA
The Intelligence Community must enjoy a productive relationship with the White House, particularly given high global tensions. President Trump needs to have confidence that his spies are playing it straight, telling him the truth (which he may not want to hear), while not undermining him with political games.
Making the IC better is a choice, a vital one for national security and our democracy.
John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.