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Trump’s Plans for the Intelligence Agencies Chart a Dangerous Course

The president-elect appears determined to prioritize loyalty over impartial expertise, in moves that may test the checks and balances limiting executive power

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Trump’s Plans for the Intelligence Agencies Chart a Dangerous Course
Matt Gaetz and Tulsi Gabbard — Donald Trump’s picks for attorney general and director of national intelligence, respectively. (Julia Beverly/Getty Images)

Retribution. Revenge. Enemies from within. Court martial “woke” generals. Mass detentions and deportations of immigrants. Dismantle the Department of Justice. Dictator on day one. We’re coming after you.

The rhetoric of Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign alarmed many observers. But one element of the incoming administration’s agenda that hasn’t grabbed as many headlines is its goal of dismantling America’s intelligence agencies, which is high on its list of priorities. Without these organizations operating as objective windows on reality, decision-making in the White House will resemble something like the pronouncements offered by the Wizard of Oz. Just like the wizard — supposedly the ruler of the Emerald City, but in reality a would-be sorcerer hiding behind a screen that illuminated and enlarged his stature — Trump in his presidential campaigns has relied on a facade of lavish pep rallies, noise and disinformation to advance his political aspirations. He is an illusionist. To make rational decisions in the White House, he will be badly in need of reliable intelligence reporting that reminds him of the real world.

Leading thinkers have long pondered the attributes of wise leadership. From Plato’s “Republic” onward, their works have emphasized that knowledge of threats and opportunities — an accurate understanding of security and success in a hostile world, as well as the options most likely to achieve them — is a vital prerequisite for guiding a nation. In turn, knowledge entails gathering information, including intelligence collected by spies and, in modern times, by machines. “Techint,” or technical intelligence, includes wiretapping telephones of adversaries and photographing their military facilities from cameras mounted on satellites. Although the machinery for this kind of spying is expensive, with the total annual budget for intelligence topping $90 billion, the knowledge it yields equates to power. George H.W. Bush, who was director of central intelligence prior to becoming president in 1989, is an outstanding example of a commander in chief who understood the importance of information for decision-making. In the 1991 Gulf War, fought to liberate Kuwait from an Iraqi military takeover, U.S. surveillance — especially through satellite spying — gave Bush superior situational awareness. This was an enormous boon that allowed for precision U.S. targeting of Iraqi troops and weaponry and brought the conflict to an early end. Subsequently, in October 1994, U.S. satellite photography revealed the unexpected mustering, yet again, of Iraq’s elite Republican Guard forces just 30 miles from the Kuwaiti border. This early warning allowed President Bill Clinton to quickly send U.S. troops and weaponry to Kuwait, successfully blocking a second invasion.

In 1975-76, I served as senior aide to Democratic Sen. Frank Church of Idaho, who chaired a special Senate investigation into allegations of domestic spying abuses by the CIA that were reported in The New York Times in 1974, and which turned out to be correct. The committee examined not only CIA activities but those of the other intelligence agencies, giving me a rare opportunity to join with Church in learning about the work of these hidden organizations. I also served as senior aide to Democratic Rep. Les Aspin of Wisconsin as he led a White House Commission on Intelligence in 1995 and 1996. I would later continue my studies of intelligence and edited the international journal Intelligence and National Security. These practical experiences, plus my own university-based research, placed me in a position to evaluate U.S. intelligence reports, among them the President’s Daily Brief.

The President’s Daily Brief is viewed as a gem of intelligence reporting. It draws together the global findings of all the U.S. secret agencies into a single daily document distributed to the president and a few other top officials by the CIA on behalf of the 18 organizations that make up the officially designated U.S. Intelligence Community. Its purpose is to inform officials about important worldwide events that have transpired over the preceding 24 hours — say, for example, the status of Russian military advances into Ukrainian territory. The president can discuss the contents of this “newspaper” with seasoned intelligence officers. Bush would often go beyond his scheduled briefing, carrying on a lively Q&A session with intelligence experts, often lasting over an hour. In this sense, the President’s Daily Brief is not so much a document as it is a process. Bush kept the intelligence agencies hopping and, as a result, was better informed when weighing options for the United States.

Intelligence can be wrong. Humans, including intelligence analysts, have a limited capacity for piercing the fog of the future. Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 attacks took America by surprise. Most of the time, though, the intelligence services have provided valuable information to the White House.

U.S. intelligence agencies closely tracked the activities of the Soviet Union, for example, including the location of its troops and weaponry. This information lessened the likelihood of another Pearl Harbor. The best-known intelligence success during these years was in 1962, when the CIA’s U-2 aircraft spotted Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. This photographic intelligence revealed that the missiles would not be operational for two more weeks — information that gave President John F. Kennedy a precious gift of time. He delayed a U.S. invasion of Cuba that might well have escalated into a nuclear war between the superpowers and, during this period, was able to negotiate a removal of the missiles.

America’s spy agencies engage in a wide range of operations, such as gathering data on advanced weaponry held by nations around the world, on drug cartel shipments, on cyberattacks and on attacks being planned against U.S. troops and diplomats overseas. They report, too, on pandemic outbreaks and even climate conditions. In 1994, Bush wrote in a letter to me that the President’s Daily Brief and other Intelligence Community reporting was better than CNN and The Wall Street Journal “on almost every count.”

In his first term, Trump’s relationship with the intelligence agencies was fraught. He viewed them as an untrustworthy “deep state” intent on subverting him. This hostility began with Trump’s belief that the FBI had spied on his 2016 presidential campaign. The bureau had been concerned about the activities of some campaign aides, including Gen. Michael Flynn, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Flynn had conversed in Moscow with high-level Russian spies in 2016 — not the usual behavior of a former defense intelligence chief. To have ignored these interactions by the staff of any presidential candidate, regardless of party affiliation, would have been an abandonment of the bureau’s counterintelligence duties.

Then came the judgment of several top intelligence officials, including CIA Director John Brennan, that Russian interference in the 2016 election had been crucial in the defeat of Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton. Since Trump preferred to believe he had won that election on his own, his relations with the CIA went into a tailspin. On the eve of Trump’s reelection this year, Brennan noted on CNN that Trump continued to “fear” America’s intelligence agencies and to “disparage and undermine” their work.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump rejected the briefings on international affairs that the CIA had provided to presidential candidates since 1960. “I don’t need that briefing,” he told ABC News. In 2017, he reiterated his mantra that intelligence reports were a waste of time. He failed to appreciate that a president needs top intelligence officials present in high councils of government — that is, individuals prepared to focus on the facts, without any policy axes to grind. As the former Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms once emphasized to me during an interview, the director “should be the man who calls things the way he sees them, the purpose of this being to give the president one man in his administration who is not trying to formulate policy, carry out a policy or defend a policy — the man who would keep the game honest.”

Early in his first term, Trump opined during a press conference at CIA headquarters that its officers were involved in behind-the-scenes plotting against him. This intrigue, he said, reminded him of Adolf Hitler’s methods of defaming adversaries during the Third Reich. The comparison left CIA officers stunned by this disrespect for their work. Trump also rejected several CIA reports to the White House, including the widely supported conclusion that the crown prince of Saudi Arabia had arranged the murder of Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, went on to have lucrative business dealings with the Saudis.

What will be Trump’s approach to intelligence during his second presidency? One can anticipate a continuation of his wars with the intelligence agencies, accompanied by an ongoing low regard for the information they provide. Clues appear in a recent Project 2025 study prepared by the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation as a blueprint for the incoming administration. Several former Trump administration officials authored the study and the chapter on intelligence does not mince words.

Project 2025 recommends placing the Office of the Director of National Intelligence directly under White House control, as well as eliminating the requirement that the appointed director be confirmed by the Senate. The Heritage Foundation preferred a dependable loyalist for this top position, rather than one who might adopt the Helms approach of independent intelligence leaders speaking truth to power. Trump clearly agreed, selecting Tulsi Gabbard, someone with virtually no intelligence experience — and deeply dubious foreign policy views.

Gabbard has said that Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian dictator, is no enemy of the United States — this despite the Assad regime’s “crimes against humanity of extermination, murder, rape … torture, imprisonment, enforced disappearance and other inhuman acts” documented by the U.N. Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria, along with the regime’s “industrial-scale killing machine,” as David Crane, a war crimes prosecutor and founder of the Syrian Accountability Project, described it.

On top of all these repugnant internal acts of repression stand the facts that Russia is one of Assad’s chief allies and that U.S. troops have been killed inside Syria while engaged in international counterterrorism operations. Yet Gabbard also believes that Russian leader Vladimir Putin would make a good friend for America, despite the fact that he violated the most fundamental tenet of international norms since the end of World War II by invading the sovereign state of Ukraine. The bottom line: Gabbard is even less well-qualified for a senior intelligence position than John Ratcliffe, Trump’s choice for CIA director.

Ratcliffe, too, is a loyalist of the MAGA cause. A former U.S. representative from Texas, he opposed the two first-term impeachment attempts against Trump. As a reward, Trump picked him to serve as director of national intelligence in 2020. Ratcliffe had slim credentials for the position, having served only briefly on the House Intelligence Committee. My interviews with staff on that committee indicate that his attendance was poor and, even when present, he rarely remained for long or asked serious questions. Upon his selection as director of national intelligence, a senior intelligence official remarked to me that Ratcliffe “didn’t have a clue about what the DNI does or why …. this will be like a pig looking at a wristwatch.”

A third recent Trump appointee is also important with respect to intelligence: the secretary of defense. For this job — perhaps the most difficult managerial challenge in the world, given the massive scale of the Pentagon — Trump has chosen, in former Fox News personality Pete Hegseth, someone devoid of major administrative experience, either in government or with large civilian organizations, and someone with little exposure to strategic intelligence issues. Although well-educated, he will find the Department of Defense an overwhelming bureaucracy. Within its structure are nine of the Intelligence Community’s agencies — half of the total — over which he will share management responsibility with the director of national intelligence. Hegseth has a respectable record of military service as an Army National Guard infantry officer, winning two Bronze Stars while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he was also a consumer of tactical intelligence in the field. Nevertheless, he will be at sea when it comes to the worldwide strategic techint programs conducted by the eavesdropping National Security Agency, as well as the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which is responsible for imagery intelligence.

Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois is a former Blackhawk combat pilot in the Iraq war and lieutenant colonel who lost both legs when an RPG struck her helicopter. She summed up the meaning of these three appointments, telling television reporters that Trump had “gutted” the Intelligence Community — America’s first line of defense.

The Trump administration and its legislative allies claim the intelligence agencies have been “weaponized” against them. This “deep state” has supposedly evolved into an intricate bureaucracy politicized by Democrats. The Heritage Foundation’s answer is to replace the current intelligence leadership and many rank-and-file officers with Trump loyalists, in a sweeping expansion of political appointments within the agencies. The think tank further recommended that the traditional requirement of Senate judgment on the qualifications of proposed senior intelligence officials be relegated to the dustbin, with these individuals placed in office via “recess appointments” that do not require Senate confirmation.

These ideas have generated concern that extremist ideologue Trump aides will take the place of unbiased intelligence officers. Moreover, the Heritage Foundation’s recommendations encourage Trump to skip the normal FBI background checks on political appointees, a long-standing filter to ensure that candidates are qualified to access classified intelligence documents.

Trump will likely continue his first-term practice of belittling the President’s Daily Brief and other intelligence reporting, preferring to rely on political advisers and, above all, his own instincts as a guide to foreign policy. However accurate and timely analytic reports might be, they could become so many self-licking ice cream cones, serving no wider purpose as they are rejected by the Trump administration for failure to fit into the president’s worldview. So much for the fleet of surveillance satellites, reconnaissance aircraft and espionage agents across the meridians that provide a stream of information to the White House on global affairs.

A core criticism that the Trump team levels at previous Democratic administrations is their alleged limited use of covert action as a weapon for advancing America’s interests abroad. Covert action relies on the CIA to employ secret operations to nudge history in a favorable direction for the United States. This approach can sometimes reap benefits, as when the Reagan administration helped thwart a Soviet takeover of Poland with this hidden hand. Yet rather than lessening the frequency of covert actions since the 9/11 attacks, both political parties have relied more heavily than ever on these methods to counter international terrorism, Russian adventurism, Chinese cyberespionage and other dangers.

It is true, though, that the first Trump administration increased the frequency of CIA drone attacks overseas to the highest level ever, and Trump is apt to continue his fascination with CIA drone warfare. He displayed no hesitation in ordering the Pentagon to assassinate the Iranian official  Qassem Soleimani with drone missiles, despite an executive order signed by President Gerald R. Ford in 1975 that prohibits U.S. assassinations of foreign leaders.

Of great concern is the possibility that the White House will adopt the darker arts of intelligence for use against domestic critics. Such methods have been tried before. In 1970, President Richard Nixon ordered the creation of a master spy plan known as the Huston Plan (after its architect, White House staffer Tom Charles Huston). The plan was designed to counter opponents of Nixon’s continuation of the Vietnam War. These “enemies” were chiefly young Americans exercising their rights to peacefully protest the war. Approved by Nixon, the Huston Plan mobilized the CIA, the FBI, the NSA and military intelligence against the protesters, with the directors of these agencies signing off on the proposal. The full range of clandestine surveillance tools was unleashed against the “peaceniks” — until J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director, decided to withdraw from this short-lived intrigue, worried that it might leak to the media and cost him his job. Absent Hoover’s support, Nixon reluctantly rescinded the plan.

Would it be possible to create a new master spy scheme, this time focused on Trump’s critics? The intelligence agencies were complicit in illegal operations during the Nixon years. Perhaps they would succumb again, with the proper Trump loyalists in place in high leadership positions.

In a 1975 appearance on “Meet the Press,” Church emphasized the country’s need to know what its enemies were doing, but he also had a warning: Intelligence operations could be turned against our own citizenry. “No American would have any privacy left,” he said. If a dictator took charge in the United States, the agencies’ surveillance prowess could enable him to impose total tyranny. “There would be no place to hide, no way to fight back,” Church continued, “because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know.” Here was “the abyss from which there is no return.”

Historian Theodore H. White recalled that, even in 1970, the Huston Plan allowed the intelligence agencies to reach “all the way to every mailbox, every college campus, every telephone, every home.” Today, Church and White would be doubly alarmed about the possibilities of a Big Brother in the United States. In 2013, newspaper leaks revealed that the NSA’s “metadata” eavesdropping program could wiretap every telephone in the country. Two decades later, America’s spy agencies enjoy even greater surveillance sophistication, augmented by artificial intelligence. Whether these Orwellian capabilities are turned against Americans — during the second Trump presidency or in future administrations — will depend in part on the durability of the governmental checks and balances established at the birth of the American republic in 1787, when the U.S. Constitution was signed.

The genius of America’s founders at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia was their recognition of the corrosive effects of centralized power. King George III had taught them well. In drafting the Constitution, they prescribed safeguards against the abuse of power, including a prudent separation of authority into three branches of government, with Congress assigned a major role in budget approvals, diplomacy, war-making and the broad review of executive initiatives.

Congress will continue to examine White House intelligence programs during Trump’s second term, led by members of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The Church Committee inquiry into CIA domestic spying recommended the creation of these oversight panels in 1976, and, with occasional lapses, they have contributed significantly to the supervision of the spy agencies through the passage of strong intelligence laws and the close monitoring of intelligence programs. The 1974 Hughes-Ryan Amendment, for instance, requires written presidential approval of covert actions and timely reporting to both committees. The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act mandates court warrants for national security wiretaps; and the 1980 Intelligence Oversight Act stipulates a review by the committees before any important covert action is implemented. Even when some illegal operations have been sneaked past their scrutiny (as with the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration), these oversight committees soon learned of the transgressions and took corrective action. Together, the Senate and House committees have trained a searchlight on America’s intelligence operations, which once operated largely in darkness.

Sometimes, the Senate Intelligence Committee has taken the lead on oversight, and, on other occasions, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has, depending on the motivation and skills of the panel chairs. Recently, under the leadership of Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the Senate committee has been particularly active. Democrats and Republicans alike have demonstrated an interest in intelligence accountability. For example, Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona — known as “Mr. Republican” during the Reagan administration — periodically reined in the overzealous CIA director at the time, William J. Casey, who had served as the president’s former campaign manager. The senator’s institutional pride kicked in, and Goldwater defended the upper chamber against the disdain for Congress that Casey often expressed.

Trump will no doubt lean on lawmakers to toe the line on recommended administration appointees and foreign policy objectives and, as has been shown again and again, many members of Congress will bend a knee to him. Nevertheless, members of the committees can push back. Current Speaker of the House Mike Johnson may roll over when scolded by the White House, but there are still Goldwaters around who don’t like to see Congress humiliated and perhaps even destroyed as a check against government excesses by the executive branch. Among them, prominent Republicans Susan Collins of Maine and James Lankford of Oklahoma are both admired members of the Senate committee. And although both committees have a strong ethos against leaking classified information, and they rarely have, the so-called “leak-item veto” of informing the press about covert action is another tool available to Congress in extremis for revealing to the American people illegal and immoral intelligence initiatives launched by an administration.

Another important deterrent against the abuse of intelligence power is the professional ethos of intelligence officers. They understand that, if asked by the White House to break the law, they have several avenues of recourse. Each intelligence agency has an inspector general to whom they can report inappropriate policy orders. On Capitol Hill, the committees’ members and staff privately hear and investigate charges of intelligence malfeasance. Intelligence professionals have also turned to the media as a way of exposing illegal operations, as in the Church Committee inquiry.

The Constitution lives on and its checks and balances provide a unique protective shield against the abuse of secret power. Yet these checks ultimately rest on the vigilance of citizens inside and outside the government, and their courage to speak out against attempts to erode the democratic principles that have guided this nation since its founding.

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