How President Trump Can Make American Intelligence Great Again Politicization and bloat in U.S. intelligence agencies have weakened their mission; urgent reforms are needed to refocus on providing vital intelligence for national security. By Fred Fleitz
https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/17/how-president-trump-can-make-american-intelligence-great-again/
Eight years ago, after Donald Trump’s historic 2016 presidential election victory, I published an article with the same title above, listing urgent recommendations for President Trump to reform America’s then-17 intelligence agencies so they could revert to the great agencies they once were that helped our nation win the Cold War. I believed at the time that the growing politicization of U.S. intelligence, especially concerning the Russia collusion hoax during the 2016 campaign, and bloated intelligence bureaucracies had damaged the reputation of our intelligence agencies and undermined their ability to provide crucial intelligence support to the president.
After the extreme weaponization of U.S. intelligence against the 2016 and 2020 Trump campaigns and his administration, as well as woke mismanagement of intelligence agencies by the Biden administration, intelligence reform is far more urgent today than when Mr. Trump assumed the Oval Office in January 2017.
This is because President Trump has lost confidence in America’s intelligence agencies. As a result, unless there are massive intelligence reforms, the $95 billion-plus that the U.S. is scheduled to spend on intelligence programs in 2025 will be a huge waste of tax dollars.
I have developed five critical steps the Trump administration should take to fix U.S. intelligence. These steps are based on my 25 years working in and with the Intelligence Community and are also drawn from Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Tom Cotton’s extraordinary opening remarks at this week’s confirmation hearing for CIA Director-nominee John Ratcliffe.
- Return U.S. intelligence agencies to their original purpose: providing the best possible intelligence support to the president to help him make national security policy decisions to keep our nation safe. This support includes intelligence collection, analysis, and covert action.
Today’s American intelligence agencies have lost sight of their primary mandate to serve the president and operate so independently and arrogantly that they have been accused of being an unelected layer of government. Our intelligence agencies have been called an “administrative state,” a “deep state,” and a “security state.” Many intelligence officials and their supporters actually believe U.S. intelligence agencies should oversee and adjudicate the President’s national security policies.
U.S. intelligence agencies also have meddled in U.S. politics. They have leaked intelligence to damage executive branch officials they dislike and to promote political agendas. They have tried to influence the outcome of several presidential elections. Senator Tom Cotton this week accused the CIA of distorting intelligence analysis over the last four years to justify President Trump’s foreign policy actions. Cotton also expressed his frustration that the CIA has wasted resources writing analysis on non-intelligence issues for the Biden administration, such as climate change and gay rights legislation in Africa.
As a result, the performance of our intelligence agencies has suffered. Distorting intelligence analysis for political reasons distracts intelligence agencies from focusing on the real, serious threats facing our nation, especially China. It also may have caused their failure to predict several recent major events and attacks, like the New Orleans terrorist attack, the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack against Israel, and the fall of Syria’s Assad regime.
Concerning the CIA, politicization and mismanagement have caused it to neglect its most important mission: collecting clandestine intelligence. If the CIA won’t steal secrets for the president, it should be shut down, and the State Department should be tasked with providing him the information he needs about foreign threats.
Intelligence officers have drifted from their core mission. Careerism and risk aversion are growing problems. Their work has been politicized. This has happened because intelligence managers let this happen and, in many cases, encouraged it. Reforming America’s intelligence agencies and getting them back to their core mission will require strong and revamped leadership throughout each intelligence agency, starting at the top. The Trump administration should mandate that intelligence managers ensure that all intelligence officers abide by a new professional code to produce the best possible intelligence for the president and his administration and hold them accountable. Related to this code must be new initiatives to reward intelligence officers for their sacrifices, innovation, and original thinking.
In addition, intelligence agency heads named by President Trump must implement a zero-tolerance policy on the politicization of intelligence and meddling in U.S. politics. They also must aggressively investigate and punish intelligence officers who leak classified information.
- Dramatically Cut Back the Intelligence Bureaucracy. I agreed with Senator Cotton’s comment this week that the U.S. intelligence bureaucracy has grown too big and bureaucratic. Cotton is correct that many bureaucratic problems at the CIA stem from CIA Director John Brennan’s ill-advised organizational reforms, which blurred lines of authority, put managers with no field experience in operational roles, and caused a surge in the number of managers at the CIA headquarters. If he is confirmed as the new CIA director, John Ratcliffe should reverse the Brennan reorganization as soon as possible.
However, the U.S. Intelligence Community faces broader bureaucratic problems. The number of intelligence agencies grew to 18 in 2019 with the creation of the Space Force. This large number of agencies is highly inefficient and has significant overlap. Most of these bureaucracies have exploded in size. One reason is that it is common for multiple intelligence agencies to create new bureaucracies whenever new security challenges crop up so they can request additional funding from Congress. I hope that streamlining intelligence agencies—and reducing their number—will be a priority for Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Part of this effort should be eliminating or significantly scaling back the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). The ODNI was originally intended by the 9/11 Commission to be a small oversight office that would prevent future 9/11 attacks by ensuring that intelligence agencies share intelligence with each other. It has ballooned into a massive additional layer of bureaucracy that has impeded and politicized the intelligence community’s work. In addition, although the ODNI was supposed to be an oversight office, it now has duplicative offices that produce their own intelligence analysis.
In 2007, House Intelligence Committee members were so disturbed about the rapid growth of the ODNI bureaucracy that they approved, on a bipartisan basis, an amendment to the 2008 intelligence authorization bill to freeze the ODNI staff to the number working for it as of May 1, 2007. I drafted this amendment, co-sponsored by Congressmen Mike Rogers (R., Mich.) and Alcee Hastings (D., Fla.).
Hastings said at the time about this amendment:
“We will not give you a blank check with which you could continue to grow a new bureaucracy before we know what you are doing with what you already have. A bigger bureaucracy does not make better intelligence.”
Although Hastings was right, the Hastings/Rogers amendment was never implemented since Congress did not pass an intelligence authorization bill that year. I hate to think how many times the ODNI staff has doubled since the House Intelligence Committee attempted to halt its growth in 2007.
The ODNI now has thousands of employees who were not there before 9/11. Most are not needed. If the ODNI cannot be eliminated, the DOGE Commission should cut it back to a 200-person office that would perform its original mandate to ensure that our intelligence agencies cooperate with each other and share intelligence.
- End DEI and Restore Personnel Policies to Hire and Promote based on Merit and Achievement. My former CIA analyst colleague John Gentry wrote persuasively in his 2023 book, Neutering the CIA: Why US Intelligence Versus Trump Has Long-Term Consequences, how the radical-left “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” ideology has seriously damaged the objectivity and quality of the Agency’s work. This includes elevating the goals of left-wing identity politics as paramount in the selection and promotion of officers. I wrote about this issue in American Greatness in December 2023 concerning a senior CIA officer who posted pro-Palestinian images on her Facebook page and a selfie photo with the caption “Free Palestine” just after the Hamas massacre against Israel on October 7, 2023.
Pete Hegseth, during his confirmation hearing to be the next Secretary of Defense, and Senator Cotton at this week’s Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, spoke powerfully about the urgency of reversing DEI and woke policies from U.S. national security organizations.
Hegseth said he will tear out DEI and critical race theory initiatives “root and branch” from the U.S. military because he believes these concepts seriously undermine the U.S. military’s mission, divide the workforce, and hurt morale. Hegseth pledged to promote equality, not equity, and to put in place Defense officials who would help him do this and promote the priorities of the president. President Trump’s intelligence heads should take a similar approach.
Cotton made similar strong comments about DEI in the CIA:
“If you wonder why our intelligence agencies struggle to collect intelligence, consider this fact. The CIA offered to pay diversity consultants three times as much as a new case officer. I’m sorry, but if you feel like you need a diversity consultant or an affinity group or your pronouns in an email, maybe the CIA isn’t for you. This job is not about your identity or your feelings. It is about our nation’s security.”
President Trump’s appointees to U.S. intelligence agencies should not underestimate how deeply the Biden administration has embedded DEI policies into their organizations’ regulations, procedures, and training. For example, during a May 2024 U.S. government diversity conference, the CIA’s Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer discussed the agency’s extensive DEI initiatives and efforts to make it difficult for a new presidential administration to reverse them.
It must be a priority for all intelligence heads named by President Trump to rip out
DEI policies and procedures “root and branch” and ensure that these agencies hire, promote, and hand out assignments strictly on the basis of equality, merit, and achievement. This will ensure that our country has the most talented and capable intelligence workforce possible to produce the intelligence that the president and his administration need to protect our security and freedom.
- Improved and Bolder Covert Action. I agreed with Senator Cotton’s remarks this week that the CIA and other intelligence agencies must engage in bolder and more innovative covert action. Although I cannot get into this issue in an unclassified article, I believe growing risk aversion has been the main impediment to these operations. I also agreed with Cotton when he said, “The timid indecision of the Biden administration’s overt actions extends to its covert actions.”
- Keeping Pace with Technology and Innovation. Recent technological developments present significant challenges and opportunities for U.S. intelligence agencies. They are improving the capabilities of America’s adversaries to spy on us and deter our spying. In some cases, new technology has disrupted U.S. spycraft. China’s aggressive efforts to develop emergent technologies, cyber technology, and artificial intelligence (AI) for defense and intelligence purposes are among our nation’s most serious threats today.
Although emerging technologies are improving U.S. intelligence capabilities, keeping up with these innovations is difficult. We already collect far more electronic intelligence than our analysts can use. Harnessing and developing AI is crucial to U.S. national security and the future of America’s intelligence agencies. CIA is already exploiting AI for analytic tasks, but this technology is still in its infancy, and, like other organizations, intelligence agencies are still learning how to best exploit it.
Multiple intelligence agencies have invested billions of dollars to exploit new and emerging technologies to give the Intelligence Community and the U.S. government a competitive advantage. The new Trump administration must quickly evaluate these efforts to ensure they are properly targeted and funded. I believe it will also be necessary to streamline and promote collaboration among multiple efforts to exploit new and emerging technologies at the ODNI, CIA, NSA, and other organizations.
George Washington once said, “There is nothing more necessary than good intelligence to frustrate a designing enemy, and nothing requires greater pains to obtain.” We live in a very dangerous world, and providing the president and his administration with good intelligence has never been more critical.
However, producing quality intelligence is especially difficult today because our intelligence agencies have been politicized, lost sight of their core mission to support the president, and have grown too big and bureaucratic. Moreover, there is no sense in maintaining intelligence agencies that cost almost $100 billion per year if the president has no confidence in them. This is why it is vital that President Trump instruct his intelligence heads to immediately implement urgent and massive reforms like the above steps to salvage America’s intelligence agencies and make them great again.
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