{"id":268,"date":"2026-07-07T09:09:50","date_gmt":"2026-07-07T09:09:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalconsumerreportss.com\/?p=268"},"modified":"2026-07-07T09:09:50","modified_gmt":"2026-07-07T09:09:50","slug":"gradually-and-then-suddenly-the-decline-and-fall-of-odni","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalconsumerreportss.com\/?p=268","title":{"rendered":"Gradually, and Then Suddenly: The Decline and Fall of ODNI"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

The intelligence community has had a trying few weeks. On June 21, the Washington Post reported that Tulsi Gabbard, the most recent director of national intelligence (DNI), might have been taking political marching orders throughout her entire career from someone often described as a cult leader. A few days after this story broke, the paper provided the receipts and highlighted specific incidents where her speeches and commentary seemed to be based on memoranda provided to her by mysterious third parties.<\/p>\n

Read more Afrikaner Refugees and the Limits of U.S. Pressure on South Africa<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0Prior to the publication of the Post\u2019s stories, Gabbard had already resigned from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), for familial reasons, and President Trump, via a Truth Social posting, named Bill Pulte to act in her stead. Pulte, an individual with zero experience in any and all fields related to the ODNI\u2019s responsibilities, most recently served as the director of the Federal Housing Finance Authority. In that capacity, he became most known for finding supposed mortgage fraud in innocuous loan documents, much the same way Don Quixote could see a lumbering giant in a harmless windmill. This tendency to extrapolate and publicize conspiracies without foundations, in a steadier era, might disqualify someone from a role requiring the rigorous analysis of facts, particularly when the nation\u2019s ability to project force upon the world stage, navigate international relations, and formulate the nation\u2019s domestic security policies are at stake. The reaction across the political spectrum, including from elements of the president\u2019s own party, was unusually frank. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said the country does\u00a0\u201cnot need a weaponized\u201d DNI. Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the vice chair of the intelligence committee, said Pulte was picked because the White House believes he will \u201cprovide the narrative it wants, not the intelligence we need\u201d, while Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) called Pulte a\u00a0\u201cpartisan thug\u201d with no experience in intelligence.<\/p>\n

One can debate whether the current state of the U.S. intelligence community most resembles a tragedy or a farce, but history is certainly repeating itself. The abuses and missteps of the FBI and CIA in the first decades of the Cold War led to a spate of hearings and reforms in the 1970s, which substantially limited the operational latitude of both agencies. A little under 30 years later, in the aftermath of the 9\/11 attacks, much ink was spilled arguing that the earlier reforms might have been too constricting, and another massive reform liberalized intelligence authorities and added a coordinating department at the top of the community in the form of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. But now, two decades hence, the ODNI appears to be acting in a manner similar to the FBI and CIA\u2019s modus operandi before the very first round of reforms.<\/p>\n

For anyone acquainted with the workings of the intelligence community, as well as a familiarity with the stakes of its decisions, the ODNI\u2019s limited effectiveness is not surprising, and the political constraints hamstringing its influence are, in many ways, the fault of its prior directors. But it still maintains access to an astounding amount of both raw and finished intelligence, and its statutory authorities are vague enough that it can still chip away at the concept of an apolitical national security state.<\/p>\n

The ODNI in Theory<\/strong><\/p>\n

The bill that created the director of national intelligence as a Cabinet official, and the ODNI as that position\u2019s home agency\u2014the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 (IRTPA)\u2014was born of tragedy and debacle.<\/p>\n

The 9\/11 attacks put the intelligence community under a microscope. In 2004, a bipartisan commission published its findings on the component agencies\u2019 cultures, practices, and actions in the years leading up to the destruction of the World Trade Center and parts of the Pentagon. The conclusions were scathing. The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, also known as the 9\/11 Commission, maintained that the intelligence community lacked both the will and necessary architecture to function as a cohesive whole. The commission particularly excoriated the FBI and CIA on this front, and the criticism led to the report\u2019s most emphatic recommendation:<\/p>\n

The current position of Director of Central Intelligence should be replaced by a National Intelligence Director with two main areas of responsibility: (1) to oversee national intelligence centers on specific subjects of interest across the U.S. government and (2) to manage the national intelligence program and oversee the agencies that contribute to it. \u2026 The National Intelligence Director would retain the present [Director of Central Intelligence\u2019s] role as the principal intelligence adviser to the president.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The private fiefdoms created by Allen Dulles and J. Edgar Hoover would now, in light of a new century\u2019s national security challenges, have no choice but to huddle together under the aegis of a new official and office. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), one of the authors of IRTPA, explicitly cited this conclusion when she , 20 years later, that \u201c[t]he 9\/11 Commission\u2019s report did much more than present a devastating indictment of intelligence failures. It also gave us strong, urgent recommendations for reform.\u201d In her telling, a direct line connects the tragedies in New York City, Washington, D.C., and a field in Pennsylvania with an attempt to restructure the intelligence community in an attempt to guarantee that no other major terrorist attack could occur on U.S. soil. Hers is a tidy narrative, but it\u2019s also woefully incomplete.<\/p>\n

In the febrile environment immediately following the 9\/11 attacks, it was all but inevitable that al-Qaeda\u2019s murderous actions up and down the eastern seaboard would have foreign policy ramifications, and few expressed surprise or significant opposition when military operations began against the group and their hosts in Afghanistan. The subsequent war in Iraq, though, required more justification to the American public of this second conflict\u2019s necessity, and so the Bush administration seized upon the arguments that its adversary was covertly stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. But within a year of invading Iraq, it became apparent that this supposed cache did not exist, and President George W. Bush established via the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction. This group\u2019s remit was to examine how the intelligence community\u2014still largely unchanged, at least in an architectural sense, since 2001\u2014evaluated and analyzed Iraq\u2019s weapons program in the run-up to the war.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Although the commission\u2019s report would not be complete until after IRTPA\u2019s passage, (in the same publication as did Sen. Collins in 2024)\u2014carried out partially during the bill\u2019s creation\u2014influenced the nation\u2019s creation of the office: \u201cAlthough 9\/11 and Iraq WMD were very different types of intelligence errors, the combination of these events had a snowball effect on the political momentum, leading to large-scale intelligence reform.\u201d One of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence staffers who worked on drafting IRTPA would , some 17 years later, just how correct this assertion was:\u00a0<\/p>\n

The IRTPA was also a result of the disastrous consequences of the IC\u2019s errors assessing Iraq\u2019s WMD program. To many, it seemed as if the IC had fallen prey to the politicization of intelligence\u2014the most damning accusation to level at the analytic community\u2014to hew to the view that Saddam Hussein was harboring an active WMD program. IRTPA\u2019s codification of standards for analytic integrity and creation of an IC analytic ombudsperson were designed to address these issues.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

With the IRTPA in force by the end of 2004, the ODNI had its marching orders: Coordinate the nation\u2019s sprawling intelligence enterprise, and enforce analytic rigor across the community. The office would not particularly succeed at either.<\/p>\n

The ODNI in Practice<\/strong><\/p>\n

Following a declination of the role by Robert Gates\u2014who would shortly thereafter become secretary of defense\u2014. It was a canny choice. A career foreign service officer and former deputy national security adviser, he had worked closely\u2014and not without substantial criticism\u2014with the CIA on anti-communist operations in Central America. Most importantly, he was known to be a remarkably skilled bureaucratic infighter\u2014a skill much needed if his office was going to coordinate among 17 distinct agencies with their own interests and intrigues. He was assisted in his efforts by his deputy, Michael Hayden, a retired four star Air Force general and former director of the National Security Agency (NSA). Negroponte\u2019s tenure was largely successful, even according to the assessments of some who had been opposed to his office\u2019s creation.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, not all of the nation\u2019s subsequent DNIs possessed Negroponte\u2019s political acumen and instincts. Within five years, DNI Dennis Blair would make a number of unforced errors that diminished the prestige of the ODNI. These missteps drained most of the political capital Negroponte (and his immediate successor, Michael McConnell) had built up for the department\u2019s benefit. The most public of these failures was an ill-conceived decision to go to battle over whether the DNI or the director of central intelligence (DCI) should have the final say over the nation\u2019s principal intelligence officials abroad, a role traditionally filled by the CIA\u2019s chiefs of station. Blair\u2019s predecessors had shared this ambition, but all realized that it was a fight they would probably lose, and that such a loss early in the ODNI\u2019s lifetime would bear serious reputational costs. That Blair chose this conflict, at a time when the DCI was a former political operative with decades of experience within the ruling political party, and was personally close with both the vice president and president, seemed especially obtuse. The ODNI had attempted to spar with the most powerful component agency in its ecosystem, and came out bloodied; everyone noticed, and it was difficult to view the DNI\u2014were any real interagency conflicts to arise\u2014as someone of particular import. The ODNI was no longer a new and shiny object beloved by legislators, but simply one more bureaucracy in a city full of them, and without much muscle to flex.\u00a0<\/p>\n

While different DNIs bring different strengths to the position, the ODNI focuses on a band of statutory functions: overseeing the\u00a0National Intelligence Program (NIP) budget that funds the agencies, in coordination with the\u00a0Military Intelligence Program (MIP); making\u00a0strategic investments in emerging technologies and collection systems; setting the that aligns collection with administration priorities; and managing both the President\u2019s Daily Brief (PDB) and the National Intelligence Council (NIC). A handful of offices\u00a0report directly to the DNI, including the National Counterterrorism Center and the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, each of which some see as duplicating work at the CIA and FBI.<\/p>\n

These are important responsibilities, but they are not operational (as in actions that occur outside the confines of office buildings and that involve direct contact of some sort with adversaries), and operations, for better or worse (and it is almost invariably the latter) are what captures the imagination of not just the public but also elected officials and senior policymakers. The work of framing collection priorities and enforcing analytic rigor when answering them is the very sort of thing that prevents operations from going sideways\u2014this was the real lesson of the the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction\u2019s final report, but it is not one that has been fully absorbed by most administrations and legislative sessions.<\/p>\n

But any improvements in analytic standards that the ODNI made were largely at the margins. The promulgation of \u2014which mandated such standards across the community, established a common vocabulary of events\u2019 probabilities, and enacted training requirements\u2014did modestly improve matters, at least in the sense that different agencies\u2019 products could now be more easily compared and contrasted when arriving at alternate conclusions. But the underlying ideas animating ICD 203 are not drastically different from the principles outlined by Sherman Kent, who is often referred to as \u201cthe father of intelligence analysis,\u201d in his 1949 work Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy<\/em>. It should not have taken a half-century, two bipartisan commissions, a massive reform bill, and billions of dollars to relearn the conclusions of a monograph easily bought from a university press.<\/p>\n

The ODNI in Extremis<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

It is entirely fair to ask how much harm a DNI, with a reduced staff of\u00a0roughly 1,300, can actually do.For the bulk of its life, the ODNI did not cause any harm. Given that it was founded in response to a national emergency, a hastier founding than many other departments\u2019 creations, that is no small thing. But its impact has been, at best, modest. A review of its published directives reveals that they are largely administrative in nature, and many of them simply direct component agencies to draft their own policies in response to problems identified by the ODNI. The organization and its director functionally manage administrivia, deconflict intraagency problems, and collate information. How much damage could putting nonprofessionals in charge of such an enterprise actually cause?<\/p>\n

Quite a lot, as it turns out.<\/p>\n

For the reasons set forth above, the main criticism of the ODNI has traditionally been that it\u00a0lacks sufficient authority over departments and agencies for its director to truly serve as the president\u2019s senior intelligence adviser. After all, the DNI runs no operations and kicks down no doors. That is why the office, generally ineffective, is so easily underestimated\u2014and perhaps it was idle hands that made the office ripe for abuse under Gabbard.<\/p>\n

Read more Accusation, Trust, and the Future of Vulnerability Disclosure<\/a><\/p>\n

On the first day of the administration,\u00a0the president revoked the security clearances of 50 former intelligence officers who had spoken on Russian interference in the 2016 election. In February 2025, amid\u00a0the purge of trans members of the military, the DNI fired more than a\u00a0hundred trans intel officers across 15 agencies for participating in an NSA group chat.<\/p>\n

In May 2025, after the National Intelligence Council, overseen by the ODNI, assessed that the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua had not entered the United States at Maduro\u2019s direction\u2014undercutting the administration\u2019s case in court\u2014DNI Chief of Staff Joe Kent pressed the NIC chair to\u00a0\u201crethink\u201d his assessment. When he refused, Gabbard had him\u00a0walked out, ending the career of one of the country\u2019s most accomplished analysts. Then came the DNI\u2019s\u00a0August 2025 clearance revocation, targeting 37 officers, including an undercover intelligence officer.<\/p>\n

In January 2026, Gabbard joined\u00a0an FBI raid on Fulton County\u2019s election office that seized more than 650 boxes of 2020 election records,\u00a0amid conflicting accounts of who had directed her to take part. The ODNI\u00a0claimed authority over domestic \u201celection security\u201d\u2014a role Congress never gave it\u2014and Sen. Warner warned the episode\u00a0could preview an effort to interfere in this year\u2019s elections. That is the precedent Pulte now inherits.<\/p>\n

None of this should have been entirely surprising. Gabbard\u2019s views on the intelligence process and foreign relations\u2014to the extent that they\u2019ve ever remained constant, or even her own\u2014are most politely described as idiosyncratic. She once clandestinely met with a dictator, credibly accused of war crimes, whose opponents were supported by the United States. On multiple occasions, she seems to have believed Russia\u2019s government over her own country\u2019s intelligence assessments about the war in Ukraine.<\/p>\n

But compared to Bill Pulte, she may as well be George Smiley.<\/p>\n

The Apotheosis of Incompetence and Malevolence<\/strong><\/p>\n

The obvious objection to Pulte\u2019s appointment: The man Trump has\u00a0set over the intelligence community has no national security experience. That is true and disqualifying, but it is the smaller problem. The larger one is that Pulte has already shown how he abuses the authorities of his position\u2014and he now inherits an office his predecessor weaponized against its own workforce, and all indications are that he may use it to interfere with the midterm elections.<\/p>\n

Pulte\u2019s qualification, according to the president, is that he has managed\u00a0\u201cthe most sensitive matters in America\u201d at the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac since March 2025. The FHFA is a little-known regulator, but it can pull the mortgage records of. Under Pulte, the agency used that access to issue criminal referrals alleging mortgage fraud by\u00a0New York Attorney General Letitia James, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, and then-Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.)\u2014every target a Democrat or Democratic appointee, and Schiff had been the\u00a0lead manager of Trump\u2019s first impeachment.<\/p>\n

The mechanics were as telling as the targets. Mortgage-fraud referrals\u00a0normally originate with the FHFA\u2019s inspector general, not its director, and Pulte had no investigatory experience. Employees who looked into how he obtained the underlying data\u00a0have been pushed out, and in December 2025, the Government Accountability Office\u00a0opened an investigation into whether Pulte misused his authority and the agency\u2019s databases.<\/p>\n

Pulte rejects these charges, but the James prosecution was\u00a0dismissed after a judge found the prosecutor had been unlawfully appointed, and the other referrals have produced no charges. What remains is the pattern an attorney for his targets described: a sleepy regulator remade into a\u00a0\u201cweapon to be brandished\u201d against the president\u2019s enemies.<\/p>\n

Nothing in this record suggests Pulte will break with Gabbard\u2019s approach to the ODNI. Nearly every tool the administration has used\u2014clearance revocation, public denunciation, control over access to sensitive programs, retraction of finished intelligence\u2014runs through the DNI\u2019s office, and the brakes that would slow a politicized DNI have been dismantled. The analytic ombudsman answers to the same leadership that would apply the pressure; the National Security Council interagency process that once forced hard questions into the open has been\u00a0gutted; and the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board\u2014whose only real power was exposure\u2014lost even that to the 2025 firings of its Democratic members. A DNI inclined to put these powers to political ends need not route a referral through the Justice Department; he holds the apparatus himself with various methods at his disposal.<\/p>\n

First is domestic surveillance. <\/strong>Turning the intelligence community\u2019s tools on Americans is the abuse the\u00a0post-Watergate reforms were built to prevent. Through the, the DNI sets what the community collects against\u2014and could turn that apparatus inward, aligning collection with the\u00a0White House\u2019s new counterterrorism strategy, of domestic groups whose ideology it deems \u201cradically pro-transgender\u201d or anarchist\u2014to \u201cmap them at home\u201d and \u201cidentify their membership.\u201d<\/p>\n

Manufacture a foreign nexus.<\/strong> The most powerful tools are reserved for foreign threats, and the administration has followed a template\u2014designating cartels as foreign terrorist organizations to push counterterrorism powers into the Western Hemisphere\u2014and could recast domestic criminal or opposition groups as \u201cforeign-directed\u201d to open the toolkit for use against Americans. Chief among those tools is\u00a0Section 702, under which agencies reporting to the DNI run thousands of warrantless \u201cbackdoor searches\u201d of Americans\u2019 communications a year. Pulte\u2019s appointment has already cost the government that authority: unwilling to leave the program in his hands, lawmakers\u00a0rejected even a three-week extension and let Section 702 expire. Whether a foreign nexus exists is itself an analytic judgment, and the DNI controls the analysts who make it. As mentioned earlier, when the National Intelligence Council\u00a0found that Tren de Aragua had not entered the U.S. at Maduro\u2019s direction, its acting chair was\u00a0walked out.<\/p>\n

Use commercial workarounds.<\/strong> The most direct abuse needs no court\u2014only a purchase order. The DNI sets the rules for buying\u00a0commercially available information: the location, browsing, and social media records from brokers. The ODNI itself concedes this data exposes Americans\u2019 most intimate lives, yet its framework\u00a0sets no real limit on what agencies may buy\u2014policy, not law, rewritable at will. Congress has\u00a0repeatedly declined to close the loophole, so a loyalist could buy data on the targets\u2014information it would otherwise need a warrant to obtain. The machinery to combine those purchases already exists. Link analysis does not store records so much as manufacture networks: One protest, one donation, and a citizen is mapped into a \u201cdomestic terrorism\u201d web\u2014the cross-referencing the\u00a0Privacy Act of 1974 was written to forbid after Nixon.<\/p>\n

Manipulate elections. <\/strong>A DNI willing to put the intelligence community behind a hunt for 2020 ballots in Georgia could turn those powers on the 2026 midterms\u2014manufacturing doubt about the integrity of the vote and the machines that count it, or targeting the officials who certify results the president dislikes. The same office could go further and selectively release intelligence to suggest a foreign power favors a Democratic candidate or fabricate a pretext to seize ballots outright and halt the count in contested districts.<\/p>\n

The lamps are being dimmed at the ODNI, and, based on its new acting director\u2019s record, it is likely that they will be replaced with torches and pitchforks. Trump told the Wall Street Journalthat an acting director is \u201cless shackled,\u201d with \u201cmore power \u2026 for a somewhat limited period of time,\u201d and urged Pulte to start firings now, before a permanent successor arrives. The 210-day clock that allows him to remain in office as an acting director is not a safeguard; it is an opportunity for an unrestrained assault. Pulte has not waited. He\u00a0arrived a day early and asked the ODNI for a list of every employee to assess whom to fire, and is weighing cuts to hundreds of positions. In one of his first acts, he fired the head of the ODNI\u2019s Office of Mission Integration, which oversees the PDB and NIC. Pulte also dismissed at least 21 career staff on the NIC, all but liquidating the intelligence community\u2019s senior-most analytic body, with additional waves of firings expected. Politico reported that he directed staff to assemble a roster of roughly 300 candidates for dismissal at the National Counterterrorism Center\u2014the hub that integrates the government\u2019s terrorism intelligence.<\/p>\n

Under pressure from Congress, the president\u00a0nominated Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, as permanent DNI\u2014but vowed he would not be\u00a0\u201cextorted\u201d into withdrawing Pulte from the acting role. Sure enough, hours before the Senate Intelligence Committee was to take up the nomination, Trump\u00a0canceled Clayton\u2019s hearing and directed his nominee not to appear, saying Pulte would \u201cremain as the Acting Director of National Intelligence\u201d until the Senate confirmed a replacement for Clayton at the Southern District of New York.<\/p>\n

The Senate\u2019s attempt to fast-track confirmation and cap Pulte\u2019s time at the helm collapsed, leaving Pulte in the chair indefinitely and the committee\u2019s vice chairman\u00a0unsure whether the nomination had been \u201cpostponed or withdrawn\u201d. As Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, recently\u00a0put it: \u201cOne day under Bill Pulte is one day too many.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Lawfare Daily: The Trials of the Trump Administration, July 2<\/a><\/p>\n

In the years leading up to IRTPA, many commentators argued that reforms to the intelligence community were necessary to unshackle it from the restrictions placed on it in the late 1970s; these restrictions were brought about, of course, by the politicization of operations at the FBI and CIA. But that sort of thinking has now taken root at the ODNI. The legislators who created the agency, and some of the leaders who squandered its potential, all bear a degree of responsibility for the ODNI not having a more important role. Incompetence is a forgivable sin, though. The malevolence now throughout the agency is a bit more difficult to view with any sort of grace.\n <\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The decline of ODNI\u2019s effectiveness, analytic rigor, and political neutrality is deleterious for the nation\u2019s security. 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