Now that Donald Trump has established himself as the worst president in the history of the United States, George W. Bush can breathe a sigh of relief. After all, it was Bush the Younger who used the 9/11 attacks to engage in decades of illegal and unneeded warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan at great cost to American national security. And it was Bush the Younger who established the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) that did nothing to strengthen national security.
With the appointment of Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence, this is the opportunity to assess the role of the office and examine the new director. Pulte, who heads the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has no background whatsoever in national security, defense, or intelligence. Pulte was chosen to replace Tulsi Gabbard for one simple reason: he is just as revenge-minded as the president of the United States. He is now in a position to weaponize the intelligence community against Trump’s political opponents.
The position as DNI is his reward for being the leading voice in Trump’s campaign to oust then-Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell as well as Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. Pulte used his privileged access at the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) to lead Trump’s campaign against Senator Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James for mortgage fraud. He will remain as director of the FHFA, where he has fired dozens of staffers, including the internal watchdog investigators.
Pulte is simply the latest in the long line of Trump’s miserable personnel moves in the field of intelligence. In Trump’s first transition team in 2016, Mike Rogers, who formerly chaired the House Intelligence Committee, was removed for being insufficiently zealous in pursuing the case against Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Trump’s appointments to lead the Central Intelligence Agency (Mike Pompeo and Gina Haspel) were mediocre, and Trump has never forgiven the CIA for concluding in a secret assessment that Russia had intervened in the 2016 election to help Trump win the presidency. Former CIA director John Brennan has not been indicted for his role in the assessment, but he is still being pursued.
The various DNIs over the past 20 years—primarily generals and admirals—have failed to build a corporate analytical community that would include the best cadre from the key analytical and collection institutions (CIA, INR, NSA) as well as experts from the academic and think-tank communities. The DNI was created after the 9/11 attacks to improve coordination among the 18 U.S. intelligence agencies, although there was sufficient intelligence in 2001 to prevent the attacks. There was a need to improve coordination within the intelligence community, but DNI was overkill.
The 9/11 Commission that investigated the terrorist attacks wanted a lean office of national intelligence, with a small but powerful staff. Instead, the DNI sits atop a huge, lumbering, and bloated bureaucracy that includes a principal deputy director, four deputy directors, three associate directors, and no fewer than 19 assistant deputy directors. The DNI has a huge budget (over $1 billion) and much of it is spent on independent contractors. The same arguments could be applied to the failures of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), but FEMA’s failure in dealing with Hurricane Katrina in 2005 told us all we needed to know.
The DNI added another management layer to the intelligence bureaucracy, although there is no evidence of increased efficiency. The current war against Iran has no end in sight, which points to possible intelligence failures regarding Iran’s unexpected closing of the Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s continued capabilities to launch missile and drone attacks against U.S. forces and their allies in the Persian Gulf and Middle East. Meanwhile, two major components of the intelligence budget—the National Intelligence Program and the Military Intelligence Program—continue to grow. These two programs had a total budget of $40 billion in 2024, when DNI was created, and now receives more than $80 billion.
As for Trump and the world of intelligence, it is certain that intelligence findings are not important to him. Even before he was inaugurated inn 2017, Trump dismissed the findings of the CIA regarding Russian interference in the 2016 election: “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.” Trump exonerated Russia and President Vladimir Putin: “I don’t believe they interfered…it could be Russia. And it could be China. And it could be some guy in his home in New Jersey.”
He was rejecting the findings of the CIA even before he took office. In addition to rejecting the intelligence community’s assessment of Russian interference in the 2016 election, Trump concluded that Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman had nothing to do with the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi and that he had good reasons for “falling in love” with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. These utterances were bewildering to the intelligence community.
