The new MAGA turf war over national intelligence

The war over what America First means will soon move to a new theater: a battle over the fate of the Office of Director of National Intelligence.

Overseeing all 18 of the U.S. intelligence agencies, the office was created in the wake of 9/11 to serve as a sort of orchestra conductor for the intelligence community, integrating operations and mediating feuds between shadowy three-letter agencies. Intended to be a small coordinating office, the ODNI has become sprawling and bureaucratic in the decades since. Republicans now broadly agree that it must be reformed.

At issue though is how the agency will change, and perhaps more importantly, who will accrue more power as a result. It is a fraught question for a GOP already suspicious of “weaponized” intel agencies.

Two MAGA heavyweights will shape the outcome.

Tulsi Gabbard, a skeptic of foreign intervention and President Trump’s current director of national intelligence, has already cut the ODNI workforce by 25% and finalized plans for additional reforms. Sources familiar with that effort tell RealClearPolitics that Gabbard is moving quickly but methodically not only to change the agency but to “set the example for all IC elements to emulate.”

Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, the hawkish chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, introduced legislation last week to shrink the size of the agency. The ODNI workforce would be capped at just 650 employees. Certain responsibilities would also be transferred, in coordination with the director, to other intel agencies. Notably this includes the ODNI center focused on counterproliferation and biosecurity, which would be subsumed by the CIA. The end goal: “A lean organization,” Cotton said in a statement announcing the bill, “not the overstaffed and bureaucratic behemoth that it is today, where coordinators coordinate with other coordinators.”

And so, the latest MAGA turf war – this one over the size and scope of the intelligence agencies – begins.

“They don’t want to reform the ODNI the way that Tulsi Gabbard and President Trump want to reform it,” said one senior intelligence official who complained that the Cotton bill would “just give the CIA more power.”

“This long predates Tulsi Gabbard being DNI. [Cotton] has been on the committee for 10 years now. It is a long time coming,” countered a Senate aide. The timing of the legislation has nothing to do with current leadership, the aide told RealClearPolitics. Cotton is preparing for the coming debate over the Intelligence Authorization Act, the aide added, and preparing to keep a public pledge.

During Gabbard’s confirmation hearing, Cotton noted in committee that the ODNI is now larger than many of the agencies it was established to manage and has staff in the thousands. Said the chairman, “I promise that is going to change.” For her part, the director vowed in that same hearing to cut out “redundancies and bloating.”

Asked where the president stands on the question, a White House official told RCP that Trump’s relationship with both Gabbard and the intelligence community “remains strong” before adding that “there are no plans to merge ODNI with CIA or have CIA take over ODNI.”

The official said that the president continues to meet regularly with his national security team, “which includes the ODNI,” adding also that “reports that seem to suggest there is a rift between ODNI and POTUS have no basis to it and are just turning things into something it is not.”

All of it is the latest in an ongoing experiment. The agency is comparatively new. It was established in 2004 after a sprawling intelligence community failed to prevent the September 11, 2001, terror attacks. Petty rivalries between three letter agencies, particularly between the CIA and FBI, had hampered intelligence sharing.

“There was some resentment throughout the intelligence community but more broadly, throughout Washington, DC, that the CIA had blown it on WMDs in Iraq and had blown it on 9/11 to a large degree, and therefore, didn’t warrant being the great leader of the intelligence community,” said Loch Johnson, professor at the University of Georgia whom the New York Times once dubbed “the dean of American Intelligence Scholars.”

A director was needed to oversee and integrate all the intelligence agencies, Johnson said, recalling the debate at that time. “And that made some sense,” he told RCP, “except for one problem: The office was never given the tools that it needed to get the integration job done.” Without the authority to hire and fire or oversee budgets, he concluded, the agency often struggles to wrangle a vast intelligence apparatus.

“Prior DNIs were the head of the IC only on paper and were routinely accustomed to yielding IC actions and decisions to the preferences of the CIA and other agencies,” John Ratcliffe said of the office he led during Trump’s first term, during an interview for the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.

The responsibility of reforming the ODNI now falls to Gabbard. When Elon Musk was marching through the administration in search of waste, fraud, and abuse, she was cutting staff and eliminating entire departments at the ODNI, such as the Intelligence Community Human Capital office which she dismissed as a “slush fund” for diversity, equity, and inclusion. “Find another agency who has reduced 25% of their workforce in less than 5 months,” the intel official bristled.

Gabbard will soon release her plan to overhaul the office further. The topline of that reorganization, RealClearPolitics is first to report, includes manpower, money, process, and structure.

The revamp comes amidst a quiet debate on the right. Some have advocated elevating the ODNI as a counterweight to the CIA, which conservatives complain has become too political. Others insist that both are bloated and ripe for reductions. For his part, Ratcliffe concluded that during his tenure, he was only able to “begin reversing that capitulation” of the office “because President Trump made it repeatedly clear to the entire national security apparatus that he expected all intelligence matters to go through the DNI.”

Ratcliffe now serves as CIA director. Gabbard, meanwhile, has appeared embattled and out of step with the president.

Trump seemed to disregard analysis from Gabbard last month: “I don’t care what she said,” he told reporters aboard Air Force One when asked about her March assessment that Iran had not restarted its nuclear program. (Less noticed in the press, however, was her testimony that Iranian “enriched uranium stockpile is at its highest levels and is unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons.”)

This rebuke came after the president was reportedly left fuming at an unauthorized video she posted to social media when the White House was still considering whether to strike Iranian nuclear facilities; Gabbard warned in the three-minute video that nameless “warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tension between nuclear powers.”

Gabbard was not present during a huddle Trump held at Camp David with his national security team, a fact that led allies and critics alike to speculate that she had been sidelined because of her anti-interventionist views. A senior intel official later told RCP that she had not been snubbed; Gabbard, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve, was instead away training in Oklahoma.

The administration has dismissed the idea that there are any rifts among the president’s national security team. Steven Cheung, White House communications director, told RCP last month that assertions otherwise were simply “efforts by the legacy media to sow internal division.”

And when the headlines implied that Gabbard seemed like she was in the barrel, Vice President JD Vance told RCP, unprompted, that that the opposite was true. “She’s an essential member of our national security team,” Vance said of Gabbard, who shares his skepticism of foreign wars, “and we’re grateful for her tireless work to keep America safe from foreign threats.”

Gabbard, a former Democrat who represented Hawaii in Congress for four terms, would normally have been an unorthodox pick to be the top intelligence official in a Republican administration. But she shares Trump’s rejection of “forever wars” and skepticism of intel agencies. Those characteristics seemed to make her straight out of central casting for a non-interventionist president eager to realign the right on foreign policy. They have also invited controversy.

Citing “the sheer volume of unrelenting attacks against her,” a senior administration official told RCP that “You can tell Tulsi touched the third rail.” This was not unexpected, they said, adding, “Of course, the deep state was going to fight back against being reduced and their power being decentralized.”