Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard recently announced that the functions of the intelligence community’s Foreign Malign Influence Center (FMIC) would be reduced and absorbed into other parts of the U.S. intelligence community. In doing so, Gabbard has dismantled the last remaining U.S. federal government organ dedicated to tracking and analyzing State-sponsored efforts to interfere in U.S. institutions, elections, and society. After the Trump administration shut down related units at the State Department, Department of Homeland Security, FBI, and Department of Justice earlier this year, Gabbard’s announcement is a particular blow to U.S. national security and a gift to America’s adversaries, who have no interest in slowing down malign influence operations that harm U.S. national interests.
In the run-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election, the FMIC meticulously documented State-sponsored threats, particularly from China, Iran, and Russia, that targeted candidates and the electoral process itself. It also made public the process by which the executive branch would notify key stakeholders, including the American public, of threats to the election. The FMIC posted regular notifications to the American public, outlining the tactics, techniques, and procedures that State-sponsored actors used to influence the American public surreptitiously. The center highlighted specific instances of deepfake videos that sought to undermine confidence in the integrity of the electoral process, such as a Russian State-sponsored viral clip that purported to show mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania being destroyed. FMIC’s transparency contributed to bipartisan efforts to quickly debunk the video.
The FMIC and Gabbard’s predecessor as DNI, Avril Haines, also publicly outlined the objectives that China, Iran, and Russia apparently had for conducting interference operations against the United States. This helped to shed light on similarities and differences in the three countries’ strategies, including their preferred presidential candidate(s).
To its credit, the FMIC didn’t fixate on one threat actor (say, Russia). Nor did it only fixate on attempts to help then-former President Donald Trump and undermine his Democratic opponents, Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, as “Russia hoax” conspiracists claim the intelligence community did during the 2016 presidential campaign. In fact, the FMIC went to great lengths to explain how some actors, notably Iran, clearly wanted to undermine Trump’s candidacy.
One would think the Trump administration would have an interest in preserving government functions that monitor nefarious foreign government activity targeting the president of the United States. Instead, in her Aug. 20 announcement of the broader ODNI reorganization and the dismantlement of FMIC, with its remaining work spread across other units, Gabbard claimed the office had politicized intelligence (a charge she also leveled at the intelligence community when the administration recently declassified materials purporting to support its claim that Russia did not interfere on behalf of Trump’s 2016 campaign). To the contrary — not only did the FMIC avoid putting its thumb on the scales of the election results, but it also avoided doing anything that could be misconstrued as censorship of free speech. The FMIC did not recommend censoring specific sources of information, nor did it tell citizens what to read or what to believe. There was no deep-state plot to deplatform conservative voices or denigrate the Trump campaign.
While the law passed by Congress in 2019 to authorize the FMIC stipulates that the center cannot be formally closed until 2028, ODNI’s decision to cripple it now means the United States has effectively ended any meaningful government role in addressing the foreign interference threat. In the meantime, China, Iran, Russia, and other nation-States will continue to use information operations, cyber operations, and other hybrid threat vectors to destabilize the U.S. government, subvert American society, and damage U.S. national security. For example, Russia is ramping up efforts this year to inject Russian State propaganda into the data sets informing AI chat bots, a tactic certain to be copied by other adversarial governments. In July, Microsoft unmasked a cyber operation by the Russian State Security Service (FSB) to target foreign embassies in Moscow with malware.
As congressional oversight rapidly atrophies, members of Congress likely will not rally to the defense of FMIC on a bipartisan basis. But that does not preclude members from using their oversight power to ensure the FMIC’s functions endure in other capacities. Only a year ago, Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee, in an open hearing, not only voiced their shared belief that hostile governments were waging campaigns to undermine Americans’ confidence in elections and democracy, but also seemingly agreed that the U.S. government should play an important role in defending against these threats.
Members can still demand the Trump administration specify which U.S. agencies will monitor the various State-sponsored threats that target national interests and, in the absence of ODNI coordination, which part of the U.S. government will coordinate analysis of this multifaceted threat ecosystem so policymakers can use the information responsibly. Relevant committees, including on intelligence and foreign relations, should call hearings that compel administration officials to delineate which countries are conducting hybrid operations to threaten U.S. interests at home and overseas and what specific steps the administration is taking to counter them.
The administration should not get a free pass to tear down the bureaucratic architecture – established, ironically, during Trump’s first administration — to protect U.S. national security and democracy from a metastasizing ecosystem of foreign interference threats. If it does, the beneficiaries reside in Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran.
