As noted in my post just now in the Military thread, I am underwhelmed by the analysis here, though it does raise some fair points.
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The Potential Politicization of the U.S. Security Apparatus Under Trump, Part 2
Analysis
Nov 20, 2024 | 16:14 (UTC)
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) logo is displayed in the lobby of the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
(SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) logo is displayed in the lobby of the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
Editor's Note: This two-part series explores the implications of the potential politicization of various parts of the U.S. government under a second Trump administration. Part 2 focuses on the U.S. Intelligence Community. Part 1, which focuses on the U.S. military, can be found here.
Amid intense scrutiny of former President Donald Trump's nominations for Cabinet-level and other senior positions, his picks to oversee the agencies of the U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) have raised particularly acute concerns over politicization. With the exceptions of former Congressman John Ratcliffe, who served as Director of National Intelligence (DNI) at the end of Trump's first term and who Trump has now nominated to lead the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as well as Senator Marco Rubio, nominated to lead the Department of State (which includes the Bureau of Intelligence and Research), other nominees have little to no serious background in intelligence or national security more broadly. These include former Congresswoman and veteran Tulsi Gabbard, nominated to be Director of National Intelligence, Governor Kristi Noem, nominated to lead the Department of Homeland Security; Fox News host and veteran Pete Hegseth, nominated to lead the Department of Defense (which oversees multiple military intelligence agencies); and Congressman Matt Gaetz nominated to lead the Department of Justice (which includes the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose director's fate is unknown).
Of course, every president has the right to choose leaders with whom he has close relationships and deep trust, and Trump is hardly unique in being accused of installing friends into positions of power. But although every presidential administration exerts some degree of political influence over intelligence agencies, at a minimum it is traditional for those selected to senior posts in the USIC to have relevant expertise and are generally seen as nonpartisan, given that the work of intelligence agencies has historically been considered as so important to be above politics. Trump, by contrast, appears to be elevating fierce loyalists whose main qualifications are ideological alignment, not experience, and who in some cases have directly maligned the work of the USIC. While Trump's nominees, assuming the Senate confirms them, may not end up being as political as feared, and though there are significant institutional barriers to widespread politicization, the mere possibility that the USIC is at risk of being politicized opens the door to harmful consequences for U.S. national security and that of U.S. allies and partners.
Truth to Power
The official mission of the USIC includes the mandate to provide ''timely, rigorous, apolitical and insightful intelligence,'' with the third word in that list demonstrating the importance of staying above the political fray. Staying nonpartisan is crucial for a variety of reasons, not least because the analytic judgments intelligence agencies make are meant to assess the world as it is, not as political leaders want it to be. In the worst case, top officials exert pressure, implicitly or explicitly, on intelligence agencies to conform their findings to fit partisan policy preferences, leading intelligence analysts to slant their assessments toward what they think decision-makers want to hear. This was infamously observed in the run-up to the Iraq War, when analysts felt heavily pressured to align their findings with the convictions of key Bush administration officials that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Similar incidents have occurred throughout U.S. history. This includes during the Vietnam War, when it has since been uncovered that members of the Johnson administration heavily pressured intelligence analysts to undercount the number of Vietnamese forces and overcount their number of casualties. More recently, in the mid-2010s, analysts at U.S. Central Command also went public with allegations that their supervisors had changed their analytic judgments to portray a more optimistic picture of the military campaign against the Islamic State that the Obama administration was carrying out.
While deliberately adjusting intelligence to fit a particular viewpoint is the most egregious way in which politicization can undermine the work of the USIC, there are several others. For instance, while analysts may not purposefully change their findings, they may simply self-censor. Rather than presenting intelligence at odds with the opinions of top officials, analysts water down their assessments or merely ignore covering topics to avoid retaliation or irrelevance. In other cases, officials cherry-pick intelligence that conforms to their worldview and ignore intelligence that is in conflict. In some cases, officials may even cherry-pick the work of entire agencies over that of others. While decision-makers are completely justified in relying on some of the USIC's 18 agencies over others, ignoring politically inconvenient assessments from one agency in favor of politically favorable ones from another sends a clear message.
There are also a host of ways in which top leaders can introduce politics into the USIC separate from the analytic process. This comes chiefly through their rhetoric. For instance, in 1993, President Bill Clinton publicly attacked a leaked CIA assessment that portrayed Haitian President Jean Aristede, a key U.S. partner, as a mentally unstable despot. Clinton's critique led the chief of the CIA's analytic division to conduct a large internal restructuring and reportedly to tell analysts that ''if they give a briefing [that] deviates too much from official policy, they may be accused by Clinton administration officials of being disloyal.'' It is healthy for decision-makers to be skeptical of intelligence; after all, there is always uncertainty in the spy world. But it is quite another to create a public impression that it is not safe for analysts to speak truth to power.
MAGA-INT
As this brief list of historical examples illustrates, politicization is always somewhat present in the USIC and every presidential administration has to some degree introduced its own biases into the work of the country's intelligence apparatus. Nonetheless, Trump's first term in office offers numerous examples of his personal disregard, and that of other top officials in his former administration, for the barrier that is supposed to separate intelligence from policymaking. Indeed, a seminal RAND study, released in February 2024, into the politicization of the USIC found that while every White House bears some responsibility, ''Under President Trump, the distortion of intelligence and truth seems to have risen to new heights.'' According to the report's authors, and supported by many other sources, the Trump administration distorted intelligence on myriad issues to an unprecedented level and did so in much more open ways by, among other things, portraying dissenters as ''deep state'' enemies, publicly questioning intelligence findings, firing uncooperative officials and routinely warping intelligence to support policy preferences. To quote the RAND authors, ''no other administration has used and abused intelligence to the same degree or with the same motives.''
It is with this in mind that Trump's second term, especially with his USIC nominees so far, is raising such concerns. Certainly, we should never assume that the past is prologue and, even if there is intent to politicize, the USIC has many safeguards against wholesale politicization. These include its vast size (comprising 18 diverse agencies, it is hard to change the entire bureaucracy), legally mandated oversight by both Congress (and to a lesser extent the courts), independent oversight and investigatory bodies, and analytic standards that prioritize objectivity. The dramatic increase in open-source intelligence, for better or worse, also provides a public check on the classified work of the USIC. Nonetheless, it is incumbent upon us as analysts to consider how a more politicized USIC could come to pass in the next four years, especially considering that Trump, many of his top advisors and the nominees to lead parts of the USIC have all been very transparent of their skepticism, if not outright disdain, for parts of the USIC.
As with all organizations, the tone set at the top is key, which is why nominating people like Gabbard and Noem, and to a lesser extent Ratcliffe, has set off alarm bells even among some Republicans. Neither Gabbard nor Noem — tapped as Director of National Intelligence and Secretary of Homeland Security, respectively — has any relevant national security experience. But as DNI, Gabbard — who has repeatedly and publicly spurned the USIC's work and embraced beliefs that are at odds with widespread intelligence assessments — would be charged with leading a massive enterprise and an approximately $100 billion budget. Noem, for her part, would likely mainly focus on carrying out Trump's ambitious mass deportation policy, but DHS's Office of Intelligence and Analysis is a key USIC member that focuses on homeland threats, and is the lead agency for the federal government's coordination with local and state partners. This means that any politicization of intelligence could have wide ripple effects. Finally, Ratcliffe — who has been nominated to lead the CIA — has some experience after serving for a few months as DNI at the tail end of Trump's first term, but he also faced criticism, including from some Republicans, for numerous actions seemingly motivated by domestic politics, not unbiased intelligence analysis.
On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly pledged to purge what he described as disloyal USIC employees, and with these and likely other loyalists in top USIC posts, he would have ideologically committed allies to do so. Even if mass firings are unlikely (after all, there are significant bureaucratic challenges to doing so when there are so many diverse agencies employing tens of thousands of people), there are many ways in which these politicized USIC leaders could bring politics more deeply into the USIC, including by naming similarly minded officials to deputy-level jobs, threatening the jobs of officials who did not sufficiently conform and sidelining those who did not. Politicized USIC leaders could also introduce more partisanship into the intelligence apparatus in subtler ways, ranging from setting biased intelligence collection requirements designed to serve policy goals to abusing the analytic review process to weed out or water down assessments at odds with the administration's agenda. And with a Republican-led Congress and the president's ability to dismiss or sideline officials in charge of USIC oversight (as Trump did in April 2020 in firing the USIC Inspector General), there are additional means to introduce politicization, or at least weaken the checks on it.
Impacts at Home and Abroad
Of greatest concern, a more politicized USIC would risk eroding what are supposed to be apolitical assessments that agencies provide to top decision-makers. Rather than presenting unbiased findings, top officials would face greater pressure to adapt their respective agency's findings to fit the administration's policy preferences. This could introduce significant biases across a wide range of issues, including relations with key foreign states, both traditional allies and partners (like European countries), as well as traditional rivals and adversaries (like China, Iran and Russia). Moreover, transnational issues like migration and climate change could be reframed in more partisan lights. For an administration inheriting a volatile world, including multiple ongoing conflicts, any erosion of nonpartisan intelligence could be very harmful.
Moreover, even if politicization is more likely to affect the upper ranks of the USIC, it could easily trickle down to the more junior line analysts, team managers and others who are much more intimately involved in producing intelligence assessments. And should there be transparent and repeated efforts to politicize intelligence, it would certainly be demotivating for more junior personnel and risk ultimately eroding morale and the quality of their work. In the extreme, it could also incentivize more experienced personnel to leave and result in more unauthorized leaks from those who remain but believe the truth is being hidden or manipulated.
Additionally, politicization would introduce risks for U.S. allies and partners abroad. First, from the U.S. perspective, a more political USIC may be a less generous one. As the Western world's largest spying apparatus, the USIC plays a special role in providing many countries with intelligence on mutual threats. However, a USIC in which partisan politics play a larger role could also be one in which sharing information dwindles, or at least changes, in some cases. For instance, one can easily imagine a scenario in which the administration's trade disputes with various countries or exhortations to raise defense spending could result in directives to hold back certain pieces of intelligence as a form of coercion, especially given Trump's frequent criticism of countries allegedly taking advantage of, or free-riding on, the United States. One can also imagine how intelligence sharing could change; for instance by prioritizing information about certain threats (e.g. Iran) over others (e.g. Russia), ultimately leaving allies and partners with a slanted view.
On the flip side, politicization could also see U.S. allies and partners cut back on how much intelligence they share with the United States, either for fear the information would be manipulated or publicly disclosed to serve partisan ends, or potentially in retaliation if the United States restricts sharing. There is a recent precedent for this: between late 2017 and mid-2019, multiple Western spy agencies reportedly cut off intelligence sharing with Austria due to fears that the then-far-right government was too cozy with Russia, whose spies had infiltrated Austria's security services. While the USIC is impressive in its capabilities, part of its strength is due to its many intelligence-sharing relationships, especially in certain parts of the world where it heavily relies on local spying agencies with much more resources. Though wholesale drawdowns in intelligence-sharing are improbable, even a small reduction in allies and partners sharing sensitive information about certain threats (like Russia) could be damaging.
If You Break It, Who Buys It?
To be sure, none of these impacts is guaranteed to occur in the next four years, as it is an open question whether the Trump team has both the intent and capability to more aggressively politicize the USIC. Nonetheless, the rhetoric and actions seen thus far suggest that the prospect of greater politicization is at least on the table and thus must be considered. While the USIC has survived periods of greater political influence before and the massive enterprise has plenty of bureaucratic checks to prevent the complete takeover by one party over another, the scope of potential harm is vast and could well outlast a Trump administration. Because the spy world inherently deals in uncertainty, it relies on a great deal of trust — both at home among its personnel and customers in government, and abroad among U.S. allies and partners. But trust is fragile, and thus any more intense bouts of politicization in the next four years may reverberate for a long time after it, especially if another Republican administration doubles down on politicization or the pendulum swings the other way should the Democrats take power.
While any hint of politicization would be cause for concern at any time, the prospect is especially worrisome now as the United States and its allies and partners face an increasingly volatile world in which their ability to control events is rapidly declining. As such, the importance of ''timely, rigorous, apolitical, and insightful intelligence,'' to quote the USIC's mission, is arguably more important than it has been in many years. As a result, any potential weakening of the USIC, even if only on the margins, risks undermining one of the most important components of U.S. national security, and that of many allies and partners
