Tulsi Gabbard can do one great service to the country as director of national intelligence: help abolish her agency.
Gabbard’s job is to oversee the 18 sometimes fractious intelligence units that in theory report to her. Because she had no experience in intelligence before taking the job, expectations were low. But she has managed to underperform them. Her most visible role has been as a political commissar, campaigning for President Donald Trump’s agenda of retribution and for his personal attention.
Gabbard’s poor performance has exposed a deeper flaw. The ODNI, as her office is called, has been an accident waiting to happen since it was created in 2004 as a response to the 9/11 disaster. It’s an awkward fit, between politics and professionalism. It has worked best when run by experienced intelligence managers like Michael Hayden or James Clapper. Even then, it risked being a “bureaucratic fifth wheel” in the intelligence community, as the conservative manifesto Project 2025 put it.
Too often, the ODNI has duplicated and second-guessed what other agencies were doing. At a time when the intelligence community needs to become smaller and nimbler, the DNI structure added more duplicative bureaucracy. As Jon Rosenwasser, the agency’s former chief financial officer, said in a CIA journal in 2021: “The ODNI had sprawling functions and authorities but wound up with a workforce only partially equipped to fulfill them.”
Gabbard has made these structural problems vastly worse. Her signature accomplishment has been creating what she calls the “Director’s Initiatives Group” to frame innovative policy. That sounds like a good idea. But when you look on the ODNI website for its achievements, they’re all backward-looking efforts to settle political scores for Trump.
The five listed “initiatives” include two attacks on the intelligence community’s review of Russian election interference in 2016, a tirade about Biden administration criticism of covid-19 dissenters, a review (yet again) of the “Manufactured Russia Hoax,” and an attack on the Biden administration’s attempt to deal with domestic terrorism. The same revenge agenda is evident in Gabbard’s online list of “Promises Made, Promises Kept.” They’re nearly all about payback.
What a waste of energy. This rearview mirror gazing comes at a moment when the intelligence community desperately needs leadership to adapt to artificial intelligence and other new technologies and to focus on real threats abroad. Instead, it has what a former top intelligence official describes as “roving political henchmen looking for people who aren’t committed to the cause.”
Gabbard’s appearance at an FBI operation last month to seize 2020 ballots and voting machine records in Fulton County, Georgia, added new worries about her misuse of the office. Meddling in domestic politics is strictly forbidden for intelligence agencies. Yet Gabbard was on the scene, following what her spokesperson said was “President Trump’s directive … to support ensuring the integrity of our elections.” The next day, Gabbard organized a cellphone call from Trump with agents in the Atlanta field office who had taken part in the search.
What foreign-intelligence angle could possibly justify Gabbard’s involvement? According to the Wall Street Journal, she has for months been leading an investigation into the 2020 election, looking for evidence to support Trump’s claim it was stolen. “Director Gabbard is playing a key lead role in this important effort,” said Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary.
Here’s where it gets crazy: The night of the FBI operation in Georgia, Trump reposted a wild conspiracy theory about an Italian company’s use of military satellites to hack voting records. “The CIA oversaw it, the FBI covered it up, all to install Biden as a puppet,” ranted the post that Trump shared.
Another wild “intel” speculation is that Nicolás Maduro, former president of Venezuela, may claim in a plea agreement that the voting-machine companies Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems were directed by Venezuela to report false results in 2020. Soon after Maduro was captured, right-wing influencer Benny Johnson claimed: “Nicolás Maduro might be Trump’s final revenge for the election theft of 2020. If he begins to sing like a canary — which he will, they always do — then who will he give up?” Reuters reports that Gabbard has even taken her voting-machine investigation to Puerto Rico.
An intelligence chief’s job should be to debunk conspiracy talk and give the president real facts. Yet Gabbard, in her search for a mission, seems to be doing the opposite. She’s nursing Trump’s rawest wound — the documented fact that he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden. Perhaps she hopes this will reverse her exile from key policy discussions of Venezuela, Iran and Ukraine, which led insiders to joke that DNI stood for “Do Not Invite.”
“If it doesn’t scare the heck out of you, it should,” said Sen. Mark Warner (D-Virginia), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, about Gabbard’s election-monitoring role. “She has no role in executing search warrants, and she does not belong on the scene of a domestic FBI search, particularly one tied to the president’s personal grievances carried out under the pretense of normal law enforcement.”
My worry is that Gabbard has so corrupted the ODNI’s “honest broker” role that the agency is damaged beyond repair. Analysts are now afraid to write assessments that may not align with White House policy views; they keep their heads down and write more cautiously, a half-dozen intelligence veterans told me in interviews. That chilling effect followed Gabbard’s decision in May to fire the top two officials on the National Intelligence Council when they dissented from Trump’s claim that the Tren de Aragua drug gang was directed by the Venezuelan government.
“Who in their right mind would go to ODNI now?” asked one former senior official. The agency’s analysts are mostly temporary transfers from the CIA and other agencies. ODNI has always struggled to woo the best talent, but the problem is worse now, former officials told me.
The ODNI bureaucracy’s growing irrelevance is suggested by reports that Gabbard spends much of her time in an office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the White House, to be close to the action — rather than at her headquarters at Liberty Crossing, in Tysons, Virgina. A foreign official likened it to Britain under Henry VIII, when courtiers were afraid to be absent from the palace lest they miss the action. That’s certainly not what the legislators who created the ODNI intended.
What might replace this corrupted structure? Certainly, there’s a need for central coordination and integration of the intelligence agencies. Avril Haines, Gabbard’s predecessor, created a “strategic investment group,” for example, to fund initiatives the agencies wouldn’t have done on their own. She also drove “intelligence diplomacy” before Russia invaded Ukraine — pushing the CIA and NSA to declassify sensitive information that would convince skeptical European nations that Russia truly planned to attack in February 2022. And she tried to coordinate data standards across agencies.
I have been skeptical about the giant ODNI approach since its creation, writing in a 2006 column titled “Fix the Intelligence Mess” that an organization that was “supposed to bring greater coordination has instead produced a layering of responsibilities and bureaucratic confusion.” I’m even more dubious after the Gabbard fiasco.
A better approach might be a small, professional cadre of intelligence managers that reports directly to the White House, much like the invisible but essential staffers who run the Office of Management and Budget. They would work for the president and reflect his desires, but they would also maintain an independent esprit, like OMB’s elite analysts and budget officers.
This simple structure would help demolish the mythology that surrounds the intelligence community. It isn’t a “deep state” with its own agenda, as the right claims, nor is it the left’s “rogue elephant” that assassinates people and runs coups on its own. The intelligence community works at the direction of the president. Like the military, it’s nonpartisan and serves whoever is elected.
Another model is the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The chairman coordinates the turf wars of the Pentagon and the competing egos of combatant commanders. But his essential job is advising the president. You would never imagine having a civilian as JCS chairman. So, too, it should be obvious that appointing an inexperienced outsider to oversee intelligence is a mistake.
When you enter CIA headquarters, you see the admonition from St. John’s Gospel: “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” The reverse is also true. If you lose the truth-tellers, you end up imprisoned in falsehood. Trump may not value his intelligence agencies, but future presidents will — and they should build a better structure than we have now.
The post Tulsi Gabbard is showing why her job shouldn’t exist appeared first on Washington Post.
