https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/24/lets-turn-the-pdb-into-the-trump-daily-intelligence-briefing/
The Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) was once a well-regarded daily intelligence summary prepared for the president and his most senior national security officials that provided timely and vital highly classified intelligence. Unfortunately, due to the bloated and increasingly politicized intelligence bureaucracy, the PDB’s usefulness and quality have plummeted over the last twenty years.
President Trump has well-founded suspicions about the U.S. Intelligence Community, which was weaponized against his campaigns and first administration. It therefore will take radical changes to fix the PDB and assure President Trump that his daily intelligence briefings are fair and objective.
I speak on this subject from experience. As a CIA analyst in the 1980s and 90s, I drafted over 50 PDB articles and received feedback from two presidents. At that time, the PDB contained 7-10 concise, carefully written articles on critical national security issues. Although the PDB usually did not shy away from controversial issues or bad news, articles would be added on issues of interest to the current president.
The PDB staff I worked with served for decades. Most PDB editors also served as briefers and were usually senior CIA analysts late in their careers who kept a low profile. They were on the PDB staff to serve, not for attention or to advance their careers. Although not every president liked or trusted the PDB, most did because these officers worked to produce a daily intelligence product that was not about politics or currying favor with the president or Congress.
Unfortunately, things changed for the worse for the PDB in the mid-1990s when the CIA decided to staff it with younger, up-and-coming officers and not just senior officers approaching retirement. Unfortunately, the CIA’s increasingly liberal analysis directorate exploited this change to put young liberal ideologues on the PDB staff, who used these assignments to rocket up the career ladder and advance the intelligence deep state.