The Trump administration is running a war with a skeleton crew, a small group of insiders and officials whose official roles seem to matter less than their loyalty to Donald Trump. When the president was making his decision to go to war with Iran, he met in mid-February with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Other people in the room included White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles; the secretaries of State and Defense, Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth; and CIA Director John Ratcliffe.
During this crucial meeting, Vice President Vance was out of town. Also missing? Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, the person who is in charge of the entire U.S. intelligence community, and who is technically Ratcliffe’s superior. When the war began, the White House put out a picture of Gabbard and Vance meeting with a few Cabinet officials in the Situation Room, looking like they’d been sent to the kids’ table at a wedding.
Since then, Gabbard has made herself scarce: She was, after all, once an anti-war Democrat who sold T-shirts opposing a conflict with Iran. Trump is also irritated with her because of her closeness to Joe Kent, the former head of the National Counterterrorism Center; Kent was her chief of staff at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), and he was her pick to run the NCTC. After less than eight months on the job, Kent resigned to protest the war and has since gone public with blistering criticisms of the administration. (Trump reportedly believes that Gabbard was shielding Kent from the White House.) But Gabbard was apparently in poor standing with the administration even before the war began: In early February, she opposedrenewing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act; Trump ignored her advice and is pushing Republicans to extend the law.
Despite her senior position in the government, Gabbard seems to have little influence—something of a relief to people who, like me, were concerned about her nomination. For weeks, and especially since Pam Bondi’s firing, the Washington rumor mill has fixated on who in Trump’s Cabinet is next to go, with Gabbard high on many people’s list of best guesses. I contacted ODNI to ask about Gabbard’s recent activities as director; ODNI responded by asking me for more information on this story. When I elaborated, they stopped responding.
[Conor Friedersdorf: The lesson of Tulsi Gabbard’s flip-flop]
If it’s true that she’s on her way out, her departure won’t matter very much. She seemed lost in the position from her first day, and she was obviously sidelined when the war began. Not that she hasn’t been busy: Gabbard looks to be spending a fair amount of time investigating U.S. election security rather than engaging in the leadership of the intelligence community. Domestic elections are far beyond the remit of the DNI, but Gabbard claimed that the possibility of foreign interference allowed her to go wandering around election sites in Georgia in late January. (Gabbard told Congress that she’d gone at Trump’s direction; the White House, however, seemed caught by surprise and distanced itself from her field trip to Atlanta.) Gabbard was likely trying to keep her job by showing Trump that she shares his obsession with the 2020 election, but now that he is ensnared in a foolish war of choice, her previous stances on war with Iran matter more than her performative investigations into voting machines. Gabbard, at this point, appears to have been fully pushed aside and replaced by Ratcliffe as the president’s chief source of intelligence advice.
Firing Tulsi Gabbard would almost certainly be a net positive for U.S. national security. She is unqualified for the job in every way, including because she holds political views that should have been red flags for a position with access to sensitive intelligence. (This evaluation, of course, is always subject to the inevitable caveat that Trump, after he tosses one of his subordinates, may well find someone worse.)
But her invisibility during America’s biggest war in 20 years raises another question: Does the United States even need a director of national intelligence? Gabbard’s appointment was full of risk from the start because of her background, but her inconsequential impact on actual matters of policy might be one more reason to downsize the bloated national-security infrastructure put in place during the panic that gripped America after 9/11.
The 2001 attacks raised concerns that terrorists were able to slip through the gap between America’s foreign- and domestic-intelligence services. The FBI handles security at home, and the CIA operates overseas—an arrangement that made sense during the Cold War, when counterintelligence was focused on chasing Soviet spies and dealing with organized crime, but was less optimal for stopping mass terror attacks. The agency and the bureau worked together but often did not share information.
After some attempts at tinkering with the structure of the CIA, ODNI was established in late 2004. Its director was supposed to be the new boss who would oversee an intelligence community that had become a patchwork of more than a dozen different agencies. The DNI was charged with making them work together more effectively and to give the president a single figure who represented all of these organizations.
From its inception, however, the office was plagued with turf wars and structural problems. This is not a criticism of ODNI’s professionals, some of whom I know and have worked with over the years. Rather, the problem is in the design and concept of the institution itself, including a certain amount of bureaucratic crossed wires and duplication of effort. ODNI, for example, now prepares what used to be a CIA product, the President’s Daily Brief, but it relies on input from other agencies to fill the PDB, which naturally creates competition and conflict over what will make it into one of the most important products given to the commander in chief.
In any case, the DNI did not capture all of the intelligence world: The military kept control of the Defense Intelligence Agency and a few other important offices. And perhaps most important, ODNI has no real operational capacity, no equivalent to the agents who conduct missions for the FBI and CIA.
This lack of capability may be why Gabbard, early on, tried to wrest control of counterintelligence operations from Kash Patel over at the FBI, an effort that failed (and should have). But Gabbard’s play wasn’t the first time a DNI wanted more say over intelligence operations. Admiral Dennis Blair, a Barack Obama appointee, resigned in 2010 after 16 months on the job, a short tenure that included butting heads with then–CIA Chief Leon Panetta and presiding over some notable intelligence failures (including two attempted bomb attacks). The reality, even now, is that the director of the CIA may be subordinate to the DNI on the organizational charts, but the CIA boss has a lot more power, more information, and, sometimes, more sway with presidents, than the DNI does.
[Read: Tulsi Gabbard chooses loyalty to Trump]
Other DNIs have been the object of both scorn and indifference in a thankless job. Former DNI James Clapper was especially hated by Trump and the MAGA Republicans for his open criticism of Trump, and especially for what they see as his role in supporting investigations into Trump’s connections to Russia. Dan Coats, a former Republican senator, took the job as Trump’s first DNI and was fired after contradicting Trump on, yet again, Russia and its efforts to meddle in the 2016 election. The president then filled the job with a series of four people, including Richard Grennell, a Trump sycophant who also served as ambassador to Germany. In Trump’s second term, Grennell was edged out of a substantive foreign-policy position and was instead put in charge of the Kennedy Center, a position from which he was fired last month.
If the DNI job can be handed to people such as Grennell and Gabbard, is it essential? Probably not; more to the point, it has not unified the intelligence community in the way Congress hoped it would when the position was created with massive bipartisan support. Instead, it has added bureaucratic bloat, and one more Cabinet-level player, to an already crowded intelligence community. Like so many other measures hastily adopted after 9/11, including the gigantic (and so poorly named) boondoggle known as the Department of Homeland Security, ODNI should be disestablished and its functions returned to the agencies from which they were cobbled.
But for now, if we must have an ODNI, it should be led by a director who knows what she’s doing and is focused on foreign threats to the United States. That person is not Tulsi Gabbard. It might be an irony, considering how poorly Gabbard has performed in the job, but perhaps her greatest service to her country is that she has made an excellent case that her job probably shouldn’t exist at all.
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