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. […]
— Read More: amgreatness.com
