The reshaping of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) is happening with intent—even if it is not always with strategy—and increasingly out in the open. Since President Donald Trump’s return to office, senior intelligence personnel have been removed, clearances revoked, offices reorganized and analytic teams reassigned, and the infrastructure around finished intelligence has been pulled more tightly under the control of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).
No related laws have been changed. No executive order has declared a shift in the IC’s analytic mission or role. But beneath the procedural actions, a different kind of realignment may be underway—one focused not on product quality, but on political control.
At the center of these changes are Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe. Gabbard has adopted a more public-facing posture, pairing administrative overhaul with rhetorical framing. Ratcliffe’s approach has been less public, but no less consequential. Together, their early moves echo broader trends across the Cabinet: portraying national security agencies not only as instruments of statecraft, but also as bureaucracies in need of discipline. The message is one of alignment—with the president’s instincts, and with his narrative.
The actions of Gabbard and Ratcliffe are not especially surprising. The president has long made clear that he views the IC as suspect, though his national security leadership in his first term pursued only limited reforms within their respective agencies. What is different now is the breadth, speed, and coherence of the changes. They reflect not just a refocusing of priorities, but a shift in expectations: less about analytic independence, and more about political reinforcement.
What we have seen so far reflects a blend of two dynamics: actions that are performative—intended to signal loyalty—and others that are reflective, aimed at reinforcing the president’s claims and perceptions. Whether these moves are meant as institutional theater or tactical confirmation, the impact is the same: they begin to erode the objective tradecraft critical to offering warning to policymakers.
What remains unclear is whether these and other adjustments related to strategic intelligence reflect the typical shifts in approaches common to any new administration or whether they signal a deeper doctrinal shift—one that would permanently redefine the IC’s role.
That distinction matters. Performance and reflection can be reversed. Doctrine, once internalized, becomes structure. And structure is far harder to undo.
Signals and Sequences
The structural shifts previewed in the administration’s early rhetoric have materialized into a steady operational tempo. In the first 100 days in office, what might have appeared as scattered personnel changes now forms a recognizable arc. The pattern is not accidental. It reflects priorities taking shape, and a center of gravity shifting more visibly toward message control.
Gabbard’s public posture has been consistent—but her pace has been more telling. From her confirmation hearings forward, she has leaned heavily on the language of correction: restoring objectivity, eliminating bias, and rebuilding trust. In her first months, she launched a series of high-profile initiatives that moved quickly from symbolism to structural change—framing the IC as an institution in need of cleansing.
In early April, Gabbard stood up a Director’s Initiatives Group tasked with “rooting out deep-seeded politicization leaks, exposing unauthorized disclosures of classified intelligence,” and addressing bureaucratic inefficiencies. At an April 30 Cabinet meeting, she announced a 25 percent reduction in ODNI staff, having shut down core centers without explanation of what will replace them.
Ratcliffe’s posture has been less visible but similarly aligned. His most notable public statement came at that same Cabinet meeting, where he echoed the president’s rhetoric: the agency was being “restructured … to eliminate the political—the well-documented politicization that has taken place in the intelligence community from bad actors in the past.”
A deeper structural shift was already underway at the time of Ratcliffe’s Cabinet remarks. In February, the CIA became the first intelligence agency to extend a buyout offer to its entire workforce—providing employees the option to resign while continuing to receive eight months of pay and benefits. The move was publicly linked to Trump’s broader effort to downsize the federal government and align agency missions with his priorities, including a renewed focus on transnational crime—a focus reiterated during congressional testimony on the IC’s 2025 Annual Threat Assessment. Marketed internally as reform, the personnel moves raised concern among former officers and analysts, who warned it risked driving top talent to the private sector while leaving underperformers in place—a shift that also could elevate counterintelligence vulnerabilities.
During this period, internal scrutiny intensified across multiple agencies in the IC. Analysts and collectors reported an increase in leak inquiries, unscheduled polygraphs, and abrupt performance reviews—tactics not unfamiliar to past administrations, but now more openly framed as political enforcement. In early May, Gabbard pledged to “aggressively pursue” what she called “politically-motivated” leaks to the press. While her office offered no details on enforcement, the tone marked a shift: internal dissent would be treated not as whistleblowing, but as sabotage—and the press cast as complicit.
But it wasn’t just personnel policies or institutional positioning that revealed the emerging priorities. The administration’s expectations soon collided with the core function of the IC itself: analytic judgment. In February, the National Intelligence Council (NIC) produced a classified assessment evaluating whether the Venezuelan government was directing or enabling the activities of the transnational gang Tren de Aragua inside the United States. The memo—commissioned by the White House—concluded that such coordination was unlikely. That finding ran counter to the administration’s narrative, which sought to justify invoking the Alien Enemies Act by drawing a direct link between the Maduro regime and violent crime on U.S. soil.
Internal emails later revealed that Gabbard’s chief of staff had instructed NIC leadership to revise the assessment so it could not be “used against the DNI or POTUS.” A revised version was completed in early April. It softened the language, but preserved the original analytic judgment.
After details of the original February memo were leaked to the press in late March, Gabbard posted on social media that the leak was a “politicization of intelligence” and affirmed that her office fully supported the administration’s position. By early May, the revised assessment was declassified and released through the Freedom of Information Act.
The assessment survived. The analysts did not. Within days of the release, Gabbard fired the acting NIC chair and his deputy. On social media, Gabbard’s deputy chief of staff described the NIC officials as “Biden holdovers,” who were removed for “politicizing intelligence.”
The changes did not stop there. Gabbard also announced the relocation of the NIC and the office responsible for assembling and briefing the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) from CIA headquarters to ODNI’s Liberty Crossing facility. In parallel with the relocation, a new internal “review group” was added to the NIC’s process—an additional layer of scrutiny reportedly tasked with reviewing sensitive assessments before formal coordination, further tightening control over what analytic judgments reach senior consumers.
These moves were both symbolic and structural: it altered not just the chain of oversight, but the editorial ecosystem in which strategic products are developed. Though ODNI already held administrative control over these offices, some former officials have warned the relocation will cause operational disruption.
Similar ripple effects emerged elsewhere across the national security community. The director of the National Security Agency was removed in February without formal explanation—a move that sent a clear message to the intelligence workforce about the fragility of tenure, regardless of rank or performance.
Nearly half the National Security Council’s staff was dismissed or placed on leave by late spring—an action that one insider described as a “liquidation.” The restructuring, involving the collapse of regional teams and the return of detailees to their agencies, reflects Trump’s view, likely formed during his first term, that the NSC should serve only to validate his policy instincts—not challenge them.
These specific events—reassignments, relocations, and clearances—establish the baseline. The question now is whether they reflect institutional theater or a deeper shift.
Performance or Doctrine? Tradecraft Doesn’t Wait for Clarification
The actions taken in the first months of the Trump administration raise a critical question: are we witnessing a series of reactive measures designed to enforce loyalty and message control or a coherent doctrinal shift in the practice of intelligence? That distinction matters not only for what it reveals about this administration’s view of intelligence, but for what it asks the IC to become. If the goal is not simply to dispute judgments but to recast the community’s function—to shift its role from informing decisions to reinforcing them—then what’s underway is more than restructuring. It’s an effort to redefine the intelligence mission itself.
The IC exists to serve a narrow and essential purpose: to collect information, evaluate it, and present assessments that help policymakers make national security decisions. It does not advocate. It does not predict with certainty. It bounds uncertainty, frames risk, and provides warning. As I used to remind my CIA analysts, their role is to tell policymakers what they need to hear—even, and especially, when it’s not what they want to hear.
An analytic doctrine exists to ensure these principles are followed. In the wake of the intelligence failures surrounding Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, Congress codified such principles to protect analytic integrity. The CIA had long adhered to internal standards emphasizing apolitical objectivity, but the post-9/11 reform process—codified in the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004—recognized the need for a unified, community-wide baseline. Intelligence Community Directive 203, issued in 2007, established the community’s formal tradecraft standards—defining the core principles of sound analysis, including objectivity, transparency regarding sources and assumptions, and independence from political considerations.
But doctrine, in practice, is not defined solely by what is written down. It is defined by what is enforced—and how. ICD 203 only works if applied. And when a DNI or president reinterprets “objectivity” to mean “alignment with policy,” the standard loses coherence. The directive may remain in place, but its power to constrain distortion begins to erode.
This is how doctrine shifts without being codified. It embeds itself not in memos, but in muscle memory—knowing what will get published, and what will not. The signals may look procedural—a reassignment here, a restructuring there—but they carry weight: a reaffirmation of control, the performance of reform, and the projection of centrality at a time when institutional relevance increasingly hinges on visibility.
For Gabbard and Ratcliffe, this may not even register as doctrinal change. It is simply the fulfillment of their mandate: to make the IC comport with the president’s will. Whether they call it a doctrine or not is beside the point. The result is the same—an IC reshaped to please, not to warn. In doing so, they erode the very capabilities the system was built to protect.
How Doctrine Reveals Itself
The coming months—not the administration’s early days—will offer the best measure of whether a doctrinal shift is emerging or taking hold. The most revealing signals won’t be more headline firings of senior leaders or formal reorganizations, but institutional attrition. The CIA, for example, has long pointed to its low annual attrition rate—typically around 3.5 percent, below the government-wide average—as a sign of resilience. But if those departing include experienced officers from sensitive accounts—particularly those who served as anchors for analytic tradecraft—the shift won’t be statistical. It will be cultural. And it will matter.
Other indicators will be procedural. The IC has established mechanisms for dissent: footnotes, alternate text, internal ombudsmen. If those tools fall into disuse—not because consensus has increased, but because no one wants to be seen as dissenting—that’s not discipline. It’s deterrence. And it points to an environment where objectivity is technically permitted but practically discouraged.
Training may offer the clearest window into this shift. Programs such the CIA’s Career Analyst Program are built to instill methodological rigor, not narrative conformity. But if tradecraft is reframed to emphasize coherence over complexity—if risk articulation gives way to message discipline—then analysts may still learn the form of objectivity while internalizing a different function: validation. The hallmarks of ICD 203 would become vestigial. The standard would no longer guard against distortion; it would facilitate it under the guise of professional development.
The review process also bears watching. Past administrations—including Trump’s first—have shaped coordination through editorial layering. If coordination shifts further into unaccountable bodies such as the Director’s Initiatives Group, assessments may come out smoother—less caveated, more assertive—but not more accurate.
Meanwhile, if analytic products minimize uncertainty, generalize confidence levels, and optimize conclusions for policy utility, the shift won’t be obvious in any one document. But across time, it will become clear: intelligence is being shaped not to bound uncertainty, but to affirm policy decisions already made.
Consumer behavior offers another indicator. If senior policymakers reduce their demand for strategic assessments on adversary intent, regional dynamics, or emerging threats and instead request only analysis that supports preformed conclusions, the shift will be measurable. Over time, products may still meet formal tradecraft standards, but the function will narrow. Analysts will internalize the lesson: to write to survive, not to warn.
These are not abstract or invented warning signs. They track closely with policy proposals advanced by Trump-aligned institutions—including a 2024 Heritage Foundation paper calling for an overhaul of the PDB. The report urged replacing the current analytic process with a centralized system designed to “better support the President” by filtering assessments through the National Security Council, aligning content with presidential preference, and sidelining dissent.
If analytic caution becomes the norm, if dissent recedes from the process, if training and production realign around message discipline—then the doctrine will have taken hold, without ever being declared.
What Still Can Be Done
Sweeping reform from within the executive branch is unlikely. This White House shows no interest in empowering oversight mechanisms designed to constrain it. Nor have the current congressional intelligence committees shown much inclination to reassert their role. Yet reform proposals still matter. They set a normative baseline, signal resistance, and prepare a blueprint for future course correction—if and when the system, or its leadership, changes.
Congress remains the most viable source of restraint. Oversight remains structurally fractured, under-resourced, and, as scholar Amy Zegart observed fifteen years ago, designed more to serve the reelection needs of legislators than the strategic demands of national security. Despite its dysfunction, Congress retains constitutional authority over appropriations, confirmations, and investigations. Even limited actions—procedural, symbolic, or strategic—can begin to slow the erosion of oversight.
Legislative remedies are available—mandatory reporting on product suppression, restrictions on discretionary declassification, statutory protections for dissenting analysis—but each requires not only technical precision but also political courage. Evidence suggests both are in short supply.
Assuming a shift occurs, either through a change in committee leadership or a newfound willingness to act, four priorities standout:
- Mandating Transparency in Assessment Revisions: Congress should require disclosure of significant changes to major intelligence assessments, particularly when coordinated judgments are altered during final-stage review by political appointees and staff. Historically, National Intelligence Estimates have noted minority views to reflect analytic divergence. A similar approach—documenting initial language before edits by non-career staff—would facilitate future oversight and deter manipulation.
- Establishing an Analytic Review Board: Congress should create a standing analytic review board, independent of the ODNI, authorized to receive internal concerns about manipulation or suppression. Its existence alone would serve as a stabilizing force.
- Leveraging Procedural Tools: Even in the minority, Democrats possess procedural mechanisms to slow detrimental developments and lay the groundwork for comprehensive action. These include submitting written inquiries to ODNI leadership, initiating formal requests to Inspectors General, and utilizing the “questions for the record” process to identify patterns of interference. While these steps may lack immediate coercive power, they create an evidentiary record.
- Support parallel analysis. When official intelligence is compromised, external actors can help expose distortion. Former analysts, academics, and open-source intelligence professionals could produce unclassified “shadow assessments” to surface omissions and challenge politicized narratives. A Civic Intelligence Consortium—nonpartisan, foundation-supported, and modeled loosely on the Congressional Budget Office—could house and elevate these efforts.
Finally, departures by credible analysts unwilling to compromise their integrity can serve as a public check. When those exits are made visible—and when former officers speak candidly about tradecraft norms, distortions they witnessed, or pressures they resisted—they help preserve an evidentiary record. That record may not stop manipulation in the moment, but it can inform future investigations, support legislative reforms, and remind the public of what objective intelligence once looked like.
Conclusion
From the 1973 Yom Kippur War to the 9/11 attacks to the 2003 Iraq WMD assessments, most intelligence failures have followed a familiar arc—flawed assumptions, missed signals, or poor coordination. The 2023 Hamas attack on Israel intelligence fit this pattern. Early warnings were overlooked or dismissed. Adversary intent was underestimated. Collection biases were left unchallenged.
As Richard Betts, Robert Jervis, and the other scholars have long argued, such failures are endemic to intelligence work—not because of sabotage or disloyalty, but because uncertainty is hard to bound and risk is easy to rationalize away. Intelligence, at its best, is a discipline of humility.
Intelligence failures are not always preventable. But they are not necessarily inevitable either—so long as institutions preserve analytic rigor and a commitment to learning.
But that preservation and commitment may already be eroding. If this trajectory holds, the next failure won’t be incidental—it will follow from choices made despite warning signs plainly visible.
When senior analysts are sidelined, when assessments are filtered to support policy, when the institutions that coordinate long-range warning are pulled under political control—failures cease to be accidental. They become manufactured. In that system, the next intelligence failure will not be a surprise. It will be a choice.
No modern practitioner has ever advocated politicized intelligence. Sherman Kent, the CIA’s original champion of analytic objectivity, put it plainly: the analyst’s job is not to be right or agreeable, but to be honest—even when honesty is unwelcome. Substituting preferred conclusions for hard truths is not just a deviation from doctrine. It is malpractice.
ICD 203 may still exist on paper. Analysts may still write with rigor. But if the IC’s culture shifts toward affirmation over inquiry, the utility of intelligence will degrade, not from external pressure, but from within. It will still function. It may even still warn. But the warnings will be blunted—delayed, softened, or ignored.
And that failure, when it comes, will not be shared. It will belong to the president who demanded to be told only what he wanted to hear.
