Senator Cotton’s Bold Plan to Reform an Overstaffed Intelligence Behemoth Senator Tom Cotton’s new bill takes a wrecking ball to the bloated, politicized ODNI—finally restoring its original mission after two decades of mission creep. By Fred Fleitz
On June 27, Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR), Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, introduced the Intelligence Community Efficiency and Effectiveness Act, a bill aimed at reforming and streamlining the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). Cotton’s bill is the most important legislation to reform U.S. intelligence in 20 years. It is intended to downsize the ODNI, depoliticize the organization, and return it to its original role of coordinating intelligence agencies rather than producing its own analysis.
Senator Cotton’s proposed reforms are long overdue and align with President Trump’s efforts to drain the U.S. government swamp.
A Bad Idea From the Beginning
The ODNI originated from a recommendation by the 9/11 Commission Report, issued in July 2004. However, it is a far cry from what the commission recommended.
Because of the failure of U.S. intelligence agencies to share critical information before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the final report of the 9/11 Commission recommended creating a new intelligence position, the National Intelligence Director, “to oversee national intelligence centers on specific subjects of interest across the U.S. government and (2) to manage the national intelligence program and oversee the agencies that contribute to it.”
The creation of a National Intelligence Director had nothing to do with the 9/11 commission’s mandate. It reflected an attempt by the commission to capitalize on a crisis to implement a flawed idea that had been repeatedly rejected in the past. Congress made this much worse when it passed the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 (IRTPA), which created both the Director and the Office of National Intelligence. As a result of the IRTPA, the ODNI became the 17th U.S. intelligence agency with a mandate that went considerably beyond what the 9/11 Commission intended.
The 9/11 Commission recommended that the National Intelligence Director’s office have “a relatively small staff of several hundred people, taking the place of the existing community management offices housed at the CIA.” Congress ignored this recommendation and mandated a large bureaucracy for the ODNI, making the DNI the president’s chief intelligence adviser and creating several intelligence centers within the ODNI. Today, according to Senator Cotton, the estimated size of the ODNI staff is between 1,800 and 1,900 employees.
Congress set the stage for the rapid growth of the ODNI when it barred it from being a small staff co-located with the CIA and required the new intelligence agency to occupy a large, separate headquarters campus. The ODNI moved into its current headquarters in high-priced Tysons Corner, Virginia, in 2008. This headquarters, known as the Liberty Crossing campus, is located just five miles away from the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. A graphic of Liberty Crossing from the ODNI website is below. [[Note to editor: you may be able to purchase a better photo of this site.]]
Politics and Dysfunction
Contrary to the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission to create a national intelligence director to oversee intelligence programs and budgets and to ensure intelligence agencies share information, the ODNI has become an intelligence producer and a large, additional layer of bureaucracy. Senator Cotton has criticized the ODNI as the “overstaffed and bureaucratic behemoth that it is today, where coordinators coordinate with other coordinators.”
ODNI bureaucrats also impose “DNI taxes” that divert funds and personnel from other intelligence agencies, sometimes for frivolous reasons and to further the ODNI’s empire-building.
The ODNI today is composed of 15 offices, including the Climate Security Advisory Council, the Foreign Malign Influence Center, the National Counterterrorism Center, the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, the National Counterproliferation and Biosecurity Center, the Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center, and the National Intelligence University.
The ODNI also includes the National Intelligence Council and the National Intelligence Management Council—two offices that unnecessarily replicate intelligence analysis performed by the Intelligence Community’s 16 other organizations.
The ODNI has been criticized for political activity. It aggressively promoted DEI during the Biden administration throughout the Intelligence Community, as well as politicized analyses of climate change, foreign interference in U.S. elections, and the origins of COVID-19. On the orders of President Obama, the ODNI produced a notoriously politicized Intelligence Community Assessment in January 2017 on Russian meddling in the 2016 election to sabotage the incoming Trump administration. The ODNI also has been attacked for refusing to withdraw politicized assessments, including a debunked 2015 National Intelligence Estimate, which asserted that Iran was not pursuing nuclear weapons.
Many senior ODNI officials have been criticized for political activity and bias, including DNI James Clapper, DNI Avril Haynes, DNI Dan Coats, and Deputy DNI Susan Gordon.
Cotton’s Proposed Reforms
Senator Cotton’s legislation would fix the mistakes of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act and reverse the rapid growth of the ODNI bureaucracy by making it into the small and lean organization intended by the 9/11 Commission. Cotton’s legislation would eliminate duplicative and unnecessary ODNI offices and authorities and return most of them to other intelligence agencies.
The Cotton bill’s reforms include:
- Cap the ODNI full-time staff at 650.
- Eliminate the National Intelligence Management Council.
- Change the mission of the National Intelligence Council so it no longer drafts intelligence assessments but instead coordinates analysis conducted by other agencies.
- Move the National Counterintelligence and Security Center to the FBI.
- Move the National Counterproliferation and Biosecurity Center to the CIA and merge it into a reorganized CIA center called the National Counterproliferation Center.
- Add counternarcotics to the National Counterterrorism Center, rename it the “National Counterterrorism and Counternarcotics Center,” and limit this center’s mission to foreign intelligence matters.
- Shut down the National Intelligence University within 180 days.
- Terminate dozens of other ineffective and useless positions, offices, and programs, including the Malign Influence Center, the Climate Security Advisory Council, the Intelligence Community Innovation Unit, and the Intelligence Community Chief Data Officer.
As a former intelligence officer who has written about the bloat and politicization of the ODNI for many years, I am fully supportive of Senator Cotton’s legislation to reform and streamline the ODNI. However, I recommend adding several other reforms to Senator Cotton’s bill:
- To make the ODNI closer to the small coordinating office that the 9/11 Commission intended, shut down and sell the ODNI’s huge Liberty Crossing headquarters campus and move the ODNI staff into an office building near the White House. I also recommend cutting the ODNI staff to 200.
- To help depoliticize the ODNI and reduce its profile, convert the Deputy DNI and Director of the National Counterterrorism and Counternarcotics Center into presidential appointments that do not require Senate confirmation.
- Remove the ODNI entirely from producing intelligence by putting the National Intelligence Council and the President’s Daily Brief under the CIA Director and moving them to CIA headquarters.
- Move the ODNI Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center to NSA as part of a larger effort to consolidate other Intelligence Community cyber initiatives at NSA.
Cotton’s legislation will not only streamline and reform a bloated and politicized intelligence bureaucracy, but also make America safer by freeing up scarce intelligence resources to concentrate on growing threats to our nation and eliminating bureaucracy that has made America’s intelligence agencies increasingly less efficient and risk-averse. Therefore, to improve the ability of U.S. intelligence agencies to protect our nation, Congress must pass Senator Cotton’s ODNI reform bill as soon as possible.
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Fred Fleitz previously served as National Security Council chief of staff, a CIA analyst, and a House Intelligence Committee staff member. His statements in this article are his own and do not represent the views of any organization.
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