On Monday, President Donald Trump named Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, as acting director of national intelligence (DNI). Pulte has no known background in intelligence, counterterrorism, diplomacy, military affairs, or national security policy. His professional experience, apart from his current administration post, is rooted in real estate, private equity, and philanthropy.
In a conventional administration, that résumé would raise obvious questions about his ability to oversee the nation’s intelligence enterprise. But Pulte’s lack of national security experience may also signal the role the president expects the acting DNI to play in the coming months.
The DNI was created in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks to establish coherence for a community whose budgets, cultures, authorities, and operational centers remained dispersed across the government. Congress assigned the director sweeping responsibilities: head of the Intelligence Community, overseer of the National Intelligence Program, and “principal adviser to the President . . . for intelligence matters related to the national security.”
Yet the office never fully escaped the condition it was designed to overcome. From the beginning, the DNI’s influence depended less on statutory language than on presidential confidence and preference. CIA directors retained operational authority, institutional weight, and, often, closer access to presidents. Over time, the DNI role settled into something more practical — albeit still critical — than the original reform ambition: coordinator of judgments, manager of process, broker among agencies, and guardian of community-wide integration.
That unresolved tension continued through the first Trump administration. What may be new with the current administration since I last addressed this issue in June 2025 for Just Security is the direction in which Trump has taken it. The DNI may no longer be competing for primacy as the president’s intelligence adviser, but instead becoming more of an instrument for political validation, public defense, and institutional cover.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe appears to have emerged as the president’s principal intelligence adviser in practice. In contrast, Tulsi Gabbard’s influence as DNI over major national-security decisions waned considerably, with the office’s remaining value increasingly appearing to lie in managing the public perimeter of those decisions and lending the DNI’s institutional prestige to politically-charged actions.
Pulte’s appointment should be assessed against that trajectory. The question is not only whether he is qualified. It is whether his appointment confirms that the DNI role under Trump is being remade into something different from both the post-9/11 statutory design and the imperfect coordinating role the office has usually performed.
What the Last Year Clarified
In the first six months of Trump’s second term, the Intelligence Community’s direction was troubling but still unsettled. The administration had begun reorganizing offices, tightening review, removing personnel, and framing the intelligence bureaucracy as an institution in need of political correction. The open question was whether those moves would remain “performative” and reversible, or whether they would settle into something more durable and substantive.
Over the last year, the Intelligence Community did not stop functioning in its traditional role. The January 2026 mission to seize Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was an extraordinary operational success, with intelligence reporting and covert support playing critical roles. Iran points to a different problem. Before the war that began on February 28, the president reportedly received assessments warning about the risks of joining Israel in a direct military campaign against Tehran. Since then, public reporting indicates that U.S. intelligence assessments have continued to complicate Trump’s claims about Iran’s nuclear timeline, military readiness, and remaining missile capacity.
If that reporting holds, the Iran case may prove less an intelligence failure than a policymaker failure: intelligence continued to assess and warn, while decision-makers chose a course and a public narrative the evidence did not support.
Throughout this period, ODNI’s role appeared to drift. CIA and Ratcliffe increasingly occupied the center of operational and analytic influence, while ODNI under Gabbard became something more ambiguous: still responsible for day-to-day community management, but increasingly visible as a public and political instrument for the president. For instance, in July, Gabbard accused Obama administration officials of a “treasonous conspiracy” over the 2016 Russia assessment, claiming “irrefutable evidence”— a charge that a Ratcliffe-directed CIA review did not support.
In the months that followed, the geography of influence told the story more clearly than any formal announcement could. When the administration executed its capture of Maduro—the most consequential foreign operation to date — the White House released photographs from Mar-a-Lago showing Trump surrounded by senior national security officials, including Ratcliffe, as the operation unfolded. Press reports indicated that Gabbard was excluded from the operational planning stage as well.
Her appearance at the January 28 federal raid on the Fulton County election hub in Atlanta sharpened the point. Captured in photographs as FBI agents seized 2020 election materials, Gabbard’s presence was difficult to explain through any conventional understanding of the DNI’s foreign-intelligence role. At minimum, the episode raised the concern that the office’s prestige had been borrowed for political validation after its influence over major national-security decisions had diminished.
By the time Gabbard resigned, the imbalance no longer needed to be inferred from bureaucratic charts. She resurfaced most prominently at the March 2026 Annual Threat Assessment hearing, but that appearance only highlighted how episodic her role had become. Press reporting after her resignation indicated that she had been left out of critical White House decision-making on Iran.
That is the trajectory Pulte inherits: an ODNI still responsible for managing the Intelligence Community, but less clearly positioned as the president’s authoritative intelligence voice and increasingly available for political use.
Why Pulte Matters
If ODNI had simply become a reduced management office, Pulte’s appointment would still be troubling but easier to categorize: A president had selected an inexperienced loyalist to keep the machinery running while relying on someone else for intelligence judgment. That would be a serious personnel problem, but not necessarily a new institutional one.
But Trump did not take the quieter path. He did not simply allow the deputy DNI or another senior ODNI official to serve in an acting capacity while the administration searched for a nominee. He reached completely outside the Intelligence Community and selected Pulte — an official already Senate-confirmed for another position and therefore presumably able to step into an acting role without facing a new confirmation process (I do not consider here the potential legal issues that may complicate this appointment). That choice suggests the appointment is not only about continuity. It places a trusted political actor atop an office whose advisory role may have narrowed, but whose formal responsibilities remain substantial.
Those responsibilities matter greatly. The DNI may not direct CIA operations, and Pulte is unlikely to become the president’s leading source of judgment on Iran, Russia, China, or terrorism. Still, ODNI is positioned to influence community priorities, shape coordination, oversee access to sensitive intelligence, and provide institutional weight to how threats are described. The ODNI also has significant declassification authority; significant access to Americans’ communications through, for example, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act 702 program; and a public platform to make criminal referrals even if not well-founded.
That is where Pulte’s record becomes relevant. At FHFA, he did not build a public profile as a conventional regulator. He became prominent through politically charged actions and referrals involving Trump’s perceived adversaries, including Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Senator Adam Schiff, among others. Those actions do not prove how he would behave at ODNI, but they are relevant to assessing whether he is likely to treat the acting DNI role as a quiet caretaker assignment or as another post from which federal authority can be used in service of the president’s worst political proclivities.
Counterterrorism is where that danger becomes more concrete. As DNI, Pulte would have authority over the National Counterterrorism Center, whose mission is to integrate terrorism-related intelligence and ensure that terrorism concerns are identified, analyzed, and elevated across the government. The administration’s May 2026 counterterrorism strategy identifies traditional threats, including al-Qa’ida, Iran, jihadist networks, cartels, and transnational criminal organizations. But it also moves toward treating political and cultural identity as a warning indicator, including references to “violent secular political groups” whose ideology is described as “anti-American,” “radically pro-transgender,” and anarchist. That framework does not require intelligence fabrication to become dangerous. It can blur the line between evidence of movement toward violence and suspicion attached to ideology, protest activity, or political identity.
The danger is not that Pulte will personally redirect U.S. intelligence collection overnight. It is that an acting DNI with little apparent attachment to intelligence tradecraft, placed atop an office already drifting from advisory influence toward political utility, could help normalize the use of intelligence language itself for domestic political purposes. Indeed, election disputes, protest movements, and ideological communities need not be formally labeled threats to be damaged by the suggestion that national security agencies are watching them.
What Still Can Be Done
The administration’s decision to install Pulte as acting DNI – rather than nominate a permanent intelligence professional or allow a senior ODNI official to serve temporarily (by statute and by regulation, the Principal Deputy Director is the most obvious fit) – communicates a message. It suggests the White House does not view the office as needing restored independence or deeper intelligence credibility. That makes congressional response and oversight more important, not less.
If Pulte becomes acting DNI after Gabbard leaves, the Senate may never receive the ordinary forum in which to test his understanding of the office, his view of analytic independence, or the limits he would recognize on the use of intelligence authorities in domestic political disputes. Congress should not treat that outcome as inevitable. Given the need for seasoned national-security judgment in the DNI role, and given Pulte’s record of using federal authority in politically charged ways, members of both parties should press the White House to explain why a senior ODNI official — particularly the principal deputy director, the obvious statutory and regulatory fallback — should not serve instead. The absence of a nomination is not a reason for patience. It is the reason a congressional response should begin now.
Early Republican unease gives the committees no excuse to wait. Several Republican senators have already questioned Pulte’s qualifications, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio — a former member of the Senate Intelligence Committee — said he had never encountered Pulte in an intelligence context. But unease is not oversight. Unless members are willing to press for answers on authority, access, duration, and safeguards, concern over the appointment will remain a political reaction rather than an institutional check.
The House and Senate intelligence committees should press immediately for clarity on the scope of Pulte’s authorities: whether he will exercise the full powers of the DNI; whether he will retain his FHFA responsibilities while serving (which appears to be the plan); what access he will have to NCTC, election-security intelligence, declassification decisions, clearance reviews, and analytic products; how long the administration intends to keep him in acting status; and how the White House understands the respective roles of Pulte and Ratcliffe.
Those questions are not procedural housekeeping. They go to whether ODNI can remain an intelligence integration office or become a political instrument with access to intelligence machinery. That distinction should be established well before the November midterms. Oversight cannot make a president value inconvenient intelligence. But it can create a record, slow abuse, and make clear that intelligence authorities are not political conveniences to be reassigned without scrutiny.
Conclusion
The concerns I raised in June 2025 centered on whether personnel changes, review layers, and public attacks on alleged politicization would push the Intelligence Community toward political reinforcement rather than independent warning. A year later, the problem appears more defined. The traditional intelligence function has continued largely through CIA and Ratcliffe, while ODNI’s role has drifted toward management, access, and political validation.
That distinction should not be reassuring in any simple sense. The intelligence apparatus has not collapsed, and the professional workforce continues to collect, analyze, warn, and support operations against national security threats as priorities are set by elected leaders. Venezuela and Iran both suggest that much of that professional function remains intact. But that is precisely what makes the current trajectory more troubling. Intelligence can still function while the institution created to integrate it, elevate it, and protect its warning role becomes more available for political use.
That is why ODNI’s unresolved role still matters. The office has served an important function for the Intelligence Community, even if not always in the commanding role the statute seemed to imagine or past DNIs may have sought. Whether the DNI model remains practical, and what adjustments it may require after more than two decades, is a larger question for another article.
The immediate issue is narrower: Pulte would inherit an office that still matters, even as its role under Trump has become more vulnerable to political use.
The office still holds tools that can shape what the government treats as a threat. It has access to sensitive intelligence, influence over coordination, visibility into analytic products, and authority over institutions such as the National Counterterrorism Center. In a normal system, those tools help the Intelligence Community bound uncertainty, frame risk, and warn policymakers. In a politicized system, they can give official weight to suspicion, blur the line between dissent and threat, and make political claims look like intelligence concerns.
That is the warning now. The next failure may not come because analysts failed to collect or assess. It may come because the institutions meant to warn and protect were redirected toward validation. Intelligence can still function and still be weakened. Analysts can still write with rigor while their work is routed around, softened, or selectively used. ODNI can still manage the community while becoming less a guardian of independent judgment than a mechanism for political cover or worse.
If that trajectory holds, the danger will not be hidden. It is already visible. Pulte’s appointment does not prove that ODNI has become a political instrument. But it gives Congress, the Intelligence Community, and the public every reason to ask whether that is where the office is headed — and whether the next institutional failure will come not from silence, but from warning stripped of real authority.
