The Intelligence Community’s Politicization: Dueling to Discredit

Richard K. Betts is an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, emeritus professor at Columbia University, and author of Enemies of Intelligence.

There is universal agreement in principle that foreign intelligence assessments should not smuggle political opinions into analysis of facts. This is a sacred norm, endorsed in principle by a nonpartisan consensus. In practice, however, facts rarely speak for themselves. With the bitter polarization of American politics, opponents find it hard to even agree on what the facts are. The current political arena is now beset with dueling charges from both sides that intelligence analysis is politicized, to the point of bad faith distortion at best or criminal intent at worst. This all threatens long-lasting damage to trust in the integrity of national intelligence functions, which in turn risks danger to national security from weakened intelligence institutions.

The U.S. intelligence community (IC)—the complex of eighteen agencies that range from big ones like the CIA, NSA, and FBI to small ones like Coast Guard Intelligence—has evolved over the past eighty years to ensure the honesty of assessments. These agencies are supposed to discipline the process with a coordination of views, straightforward distinction between clear data and uncertain probabilities, and checks and balances in producing judgments. With only manageable exceptions, the process has been insulated from pressure by policymakers since its inception. The fact that this was dispelled so quickly and dramatically recently has made its breakdown particularly startling.

The damage might have been limited if it stopped with President Donald Trump's apparent disdain for the IC’s expertise. He has often been indifferent to intelligence functions. After Trump returned to office, he allowed businessman Elon Musk to subject parts of the IC to reductions of personnel on the apparent assumption that much of their work was unimportant, just like other government departments. When Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard delivered an analysis inconsistent with Trump’s claim that Iran had decided to build a nuclear weapon, the president effectively dismissed the IC’s role when he declared “I don't care what she said.”

Indifference toward intelligence is bad enough since it sets the country up for greater risk of strategic surprise. As warnings are buried or brushed off, the danger of being blindsided increases. Sidelining intelligence is especially dangerous when, as at present, a managerially inexperienced group of overloaded and thinly-staffed policymakers may face crises over Taiwan, the Middle East, Ukraine, or some other unanticipated contingency at any time. The bigger problem that the United States faces from the administration’s approach is worse than inattention, however.

Trump has seen the IC as his political enemy, part of a Democratic “deep state” seeking to subvert his policies rather than a benign “permanent government” of neutral professionals—an instrument that, like the rest of government, must be brought to heel. He and Gabbard shifted over the summer from indifference to punishment and unleashed unprecedented accusations against their predecessors of criminal acts of politicization, to the point of contemplating indictment of former President Barack Obama and the highest-level managers of the IC under President Joe Biden. In response, Democrats have countered with politicization charges of their own, seeing Republican charges as blatant corruption of the intelligence system.

The Politicization of Fact

Dueling charges of intelligence politicization are in some ways the same problem as the rest of the government's career bureaucracy faces, with Trump seeking to overturn more than a century and a half of recruiting the civil service on the basis of professional merit rather than personal loyalty. One crucial point, however, makes the issue different for intelligence. Unlike the staff at State, Defense, Homeland Security, or the National Security Council, intelligence personnel are in principle only supposed to get and evaluate evidence, not wield information to promote a particular policy agenda. The same distinction between professional expertise and loyalty to an administration’s policy purposes is fundamental in civil-military relations and technical analysis outside the IC.

Trump and his appointees appear to have dismissed this distinction. Upset by unwelcome economic data, he fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while Trump-appointed officials fired or refused to promote several generals and admirals and rescinded the appointment of a West Point professor for reasons of policy opinion. Meanwhile, curricula at institutions throughout the professional military education system have reportedly been subject to review according to policy-driven criteria. Critics in the Democratic opposition, as well as independent establishment experts see such action as egregiously politicized suppression of objective professionalism; the administration sees it as excising “woke” dishonesty from government and education.

Apart from gathering information that foreign governments or groups want to hide, the prime value of intelligence often lies in telling leaders facts or implications they don't want to hear. Doing so frustrates leaders’ ambitions or complicates their aims but can also protect them from disastrous mistakes due to ignorance or erroneous assumptions. In Trump’s first administration, he was outraged by the conclusion of an Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) produced in the last days of the Obama administration that Russia had secretly worked to promote Trump's election, and he conflated this issue with the question of whether his campaign colluded with Moscow. The ICA did not contend the latter point but in 2025 the official website of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence National Intelligence (ODNI) echoed Trump’s own mantra and referred to “the Russia collusion hoax.”

Early in Trump’s first administration, critics were astounded to see the president of the United States publicly reject his own government's investigation and accept Russian President Vladimir Putin's denial of interference. Then, in his second term, DNI Gabbard fired top managers of the National Intelligence Council (NIC) after it had produced an assessment that undercut the legal basis for Trump's policy on deportation of Venezuelan migrants. She then relocated the CIA-housed NIC to her own ODNI headquarters, “to end the weaponization and politicization of the intelligence community,” according to a spokesperson. To critics this signaled intent to impose policy line discipline on the analytic process.

The administration has not worried about its own politicization of its anti-politicization campaign, listing, for example, “Declassified Evidence of Obama Administration Conspiracy to Subvert President Trump's 2016 Victory and Presidency” on the ODNI website. Gabbard publicly stated that President Obama had directed preparation of a narrative he “knew to be false” and the Justice Department sought a grand jury investigation of former DNI James Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan, and FBI Director James Comey as part of this claim.

These charges are almost certain to founder eventually. Gabbard's strident rhetoric has deprived her of any pretension to analytical judgment independent of the president. Abusive politicization by the Trump side far outweighs lapses of political neutrality by IC personnel. The administration and Republican-controlled Congress, however, have mounted a strenuous public relations offensive claiming the opposite. They have published hundreds of pages of redacted emails and declassified documents to make their case.

One example is the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence’s forty-six-page report from September 2020 that reviewed the ICA report on the Russia-backed influence campaign of the 2016 U.S. election. Last month, the DNI released this detailed lawyerly critique of the ICA, which minutely parses the alleged negligent omission or misinterpretation of various nuances and ambiguities in the production process. Whether the paper, or cross-examination of it by the personnel accused in it of dereliction might be validated in a court case, is for practical purposes irrelevant. The rigid alignments of today's polarized political system make it unlikely that either side will be persuaded by interpretations of evidence that come from the other. With both sides dueling viciously, the image of upright expert intelligence will fade. The country therefore faces the risk that in the future, whichever side is out of power, will assume the IC's claim to unpoliticized objectivity to be hollow.

Weakened Intelligence Analysis

The steps taken so far raise serious concerns that Trump will purge all disagreeable intelligence professionals and replace them with pliant team players, turning intelligence into another political football. This would strike not just at the integrity of the system but at the basic purpose of the IC by intensifying the risk of damaging surprise. A crucial question for the future is how far down politicization of hiring and promotion will go, and whether unpoliticized professionals who have the option to continue in their jobs, will choose to remain and be seed corn for a restoration of political neutrality. This is a particular problem for the CIA, more so than for other intelligence agencies that play a smaller role in estimates. In contrast to practically all the other IC agencies, the CIA does not report to a parent policy department like Defense, State, or Treasury, and its analysts traditionally faced no risk of souring their career prospects if their conclusions do not comport with the judgments of policymakers in those departments. Now this autonomy from policy requirements seems to have disappeared.

Another problem is an old one. As normally happens but intensifies with polarization, dissidents in the policy arena will leak intelligence information to the press, periodically reviving controversy about intelligence judgments and the justification of policy choices. For example, press reports about the “preliminary” and “low confidence” Defense Intelligence Agency assessment that the June 2025 U.S. attack damaged Iranian nuclear potential less than the president claimed sparked the administration's repudiation of the document.

Although civil libertarians and journalists would not like to hear it, one way to dampen these problems would be to reduce breaches of intelligence secrecy. Dueling charges of politicization are inevitable as long as assessments in question are press fodder. If more intelligence controversies could be kept secret, internal debate could be more civilized; policymakers can be more relaxed if internal dissents or controversies do not spill out to fuel political opposition in public. But whether or not it is desirable, more secrecy is not in the cards. Secrecy is least valued and respected when political combat is most intense. Some number of leaks is inevitable simply because it is too tempting to use any facts and alleged facts as ammunition in policy debate, and to do so with biased spin. (Most leaks probably do not come from the IC itself, but from other government departments to which intelligence is distributed).

Beyond controversy over analytical judgments, energized incentives to leak also raise the risk of damage to collection of intelligence abroad by revealing sources or methods. Press reports in June 2025 of an intercepted Iranian phone call claiming low damage from the U.S. attack might help Iranian counterintelligence trace and plug access to the sort of call intercepted. Most alarmingly, the Washington Post reported that CIA professionals fought in vain to prevent the House Intelligence Committee’s paper that was only minimally redacted from being released because they believed it contained a large amount of sensitive information on sources and methods that would prove valuable to U.S. enemies. So, recruitment of agents abroad may suffer as the U.S. reputation for reliability declines. Reports that spies in the Kremlin were sources for the Russian election interference ICA cannot inspire prospective spies' confidence that they will avoid detection.

Returning to Nonpartisanship

At one level, the conflict between Trump administration political leaders and IC professionals is all part of the polarization of American politics and Trump's revolutionary moves to transform the government. If administration policy on converting much of the civil service to “at will” appointments for serving the president's agenda is applied to the intelligence agencies, the norm of nonpartisan intelligence work will lose all credibility. If continued in an administration still aligned with Trump’s view of the IC after 2028, it could become a contrary norm that gets ever harder to reverse. Looking however far ahead, when a Democratic administration (or a more traditional non-Trumpist Republican successor) comes to power after such overt politicization, there will be strong incentives to clean house and replace the upper ranks in the IC.

House cleaning could theoretically be done in a way that reestablishes the vital nonpartisan professional character of the intelligence work force. As a practical matter, however, it will be hard to prevent the change from being seen by laymen as simple revenge and counter-politicization, affirming the assumption that any administration will press the IC to support its policy preferences. To reinforce the strategy of strengthening nonpartisan professionalism a restoration would probably have to pick the top managerial appointments for the IC from among its long-serving professionals rather than from the party’s stable of prestigious establishment outsiders—the usual source of high-level appointments in most executive branch departments. This has sometimes been done in the past but could be more difficult to do in the future if the career ranks are decimated by reductions or early retirements under Trump, as has reportedly occurred.

Another way to guard against suspicion of counter-politicization would be to appoint a Republican as DNI for a Democratic administration or vice versa. This has precedent in President John F. Kennedy’s appointment of John McCone as Director of Central Intelligence, and precedent from other departments as with Obama’s choices of Robert Gates and Chuck Hagel as secretaries of defense. Another option would be to make the DNI and CIA director term appointments that are not supposed to turn over with a change of administration, like the Joint Chiefs of Staff or FBI Director.

Other symbolic acts might help, but considering management strategies so far into the future is getting ahead of the game. Unfortunately, protecting or restoring the norm of firm nonpartisanship to management of the IC will probably not be feasible without mitigating the general polarization and recent heat of the American political system as a whole.

This work represents the views and opinions solely of the author. The Council on Foreign Relations is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher, and takes no institutional position on matters of policy.