FILE – Jay Clayton, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, listens during a news conference in New York, March 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File) President Trump has announced his intent to nominate Jay Clayton as the director of National Intelligence, with the controversial Bill Pulte set to take the reins as acting director upon Tulsi Gabbard’s accelerated departure last week. While it remains to be seen how long Pulte will serve in the role, Trump has stated that he intends to have Pulte reduce the size of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), calling it “unnecessary and/or too big.”
Apparently not content with the reported 40 percent workforce reduction and declining morale inflicted by Gabbard, Trump is pushing for Clayton to lead a dramatically smaller and weaker office. This would be a massive mistake that undermines the necessary role ODNI plays in coordinating the 18 organizations comprising the intelligence community. ODNI is not a perfect organization, and there are reforms to be made. Its mission and its staff size have grown over time, and careful study is warranted in order to right-size both. However, as Senate Intelligence Vice Chair Mark Warner (D-Va.) stated, serious discussion is necessary before dismantling organizations created to address failures identified after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Reducing the office’s ability to deconflict intelligence collection resources and provide strategic guidance on national intelligence priorities would be a colossal step backward and would make America less safe.
The position of director of National Intelligence was created by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 to give the intelligence community an authoritative integrator — a “quarterback” who could call the plays and assign roles to the other players, in the words of the 9/11 Commission. Today, it carries out that mission by deconflicting intelligence collection resources and publishing the National Intelligence Priorities Framework to guide the community’s planning and prioritization.
But it is more than just a convening authority — it also plays a key role in producing overarching intelligence strategies, setting broad analytic standards and policy and managing intelligence sharing relationships.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is the only office within the intelligence community that can manage the entire picture of what CIA, FBI, National Security Agency and other agencies share with a specific foreign partner, thanks to its role as an independent organization that spans the entirety of the community. Eliminating it in a world full of simmering conflicts from Europe to the Indo-Pacific would be incredibly detrimental to the U.S. government’s ability to rapidly share critical intelligence from the whole of the intelligence community with partners and allies.
Despite President Trump’s apparent anathema towards coordinated interagency policymaking, coherent and well-aligned government policy on any topic requires cooperation and deconfliction. We’ve already seen this movie play out with Trump’s reduction of the National Security Council staff to a bare-bones organization.
That organization also suffered from bloat and mission creep, but it served a valuable role in coordinating and directing an interagency process to address some of the most difficult national security and foreign policy issues facing the United States. Eliminating coordination mechanisms has resulted in departments and agencies working on critical and cross-cutting issues like China and AI from their own individual silos — sometimes at cross-purposes.
Taking an ax to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence would drive these same sorts of siloed approaches, creating more duplication among intelligence community agencies and resulting in a massive step backward into the era of stovepipes that failed to prevent the 9/11 attacks. Crucially, the Trump administration and its allies have not identified an organization that would take on the key functions that ODNI has carried out for the past 22 years.
Given recent reports of turf wars between ODNI and CIA, it seems plausible that current CIA Director John Ratcliffe is advocating for the reestablishment of the now-defunct role of director of Central Intelligence role to Langley. This would be a grave mistake.
In its report, the 9/11 Commission identified that having one person wear three hats as the head of the CIA, the community manager of the intelligence community and the principal intelligence advisor to the president was fundamentally flawed. Congress established the director of National Intelligence to be the central coordinating authority for the intelligence community because it could serve as an honest broker in a way that the director of Central Intelligence, with its parochial CIA interests, could not.
If President Trump and his Republican allies in Congress are truly interested in downsizing ODNI, they should take their case to the House and Senate Intelligence committees, where senior Democrats have indicated their willingness to make careful and considered reforms. However, Trump’s current plan of appointing a national security novice to essentially dismantle or outright eliminate the office is playing unacceptably fast and loose with America’s national security.
Danielle Steitz is director of National Security Policy at Progressive Policy Institute.
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