Wokeness Is Just One Facet of U.S. Intel’s Flaws

T he Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is moving swiftly through the bureaucracy, eliminating waste and fraud at such a pace that its employees will soon work themselves out of a job. Presumably, after they have dealt with the most glaring and obvious abuses of fraud and waste, they will settle into a routine of collaborating with Trump administration appointees at federal agencies to outline areas for improvement, push forward implementation, and put mechanisms in place to prevent recidivism. That next phase begins with proposals for Reductions in Force (RIF) — tough cuts to the workforce that will require a hard look at mission statements, programmatic activities, and the functional roles of agencies and their constituent components.

However, those categories of mission, program, and function don’t apply when right-sizing some of the biggest and most wasteful parts of the U.S. government. The Department of Defense, the State Department, and the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) all operate under a mission statement involving national defense and security. Their programs can all be justified in terms of protecting the American people and promoting peace and security. Their activities overlap with every other part of the government, occupying the attention of most senior policymakers, and contributing to the image and legacy of countless politicians.

The problem is most acute in the Intelligence Community, where it could take years for the Trump administration to wade through the many barriers of classification status, budgetary obfuscation, and exaggerated rhetoric that officials use to justify their resource demands. Even the sheer number of employees is unknowable, with so many operatives under various covers, intelligence officers loaned out to other agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and a web of contractors and public-private partnerships whose jobs cannot be disentangled or distinguished from their federal counterparts. Simply eliminating offices involved with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and declaring it a victory for efficiency would miss the point.

Efficiencies of scale within the bloated workforce of the IC will only come with understanding the norms and habits that shape its day-to-day routines. Foremost among them is the practical way these agencies operate as a free market of information and ideas. There are expectations for how information is vetted and distributed, understandings that collectors and analysts are supposed to stay broadly within the lanes of their portfolios, and approved channels for communicating with senior policymakers. But the rules and norms that are nominally meant to encourage collaboration and transparency are, for the most part, only partially mitigating a much deeper, underlying ethos of competition that is mirrored at the individual and institutional levels.

Collectors in the field can become enamored with the access and power that derives from serving as a representative of the most technologically sophisticated and influential power on the face of the planet. Analysts can become confident in their abilities given the enormous pool of resources placed at their disposal through convenient data integration platforms and rapid translation. The expansion of hiring after 9/11 and the intense focus on select topics such as terrorism and weapons of mass destruction created obstacles for young professionals to rise through the ranks for a while. But the ensuing process of institutional reform and reorganization, the massive growth of contracting, and the vast expansion of private sector intelligence companies created new opportunities.

With intelligence agencies increasingly hiring young — and new recruits given the opportunity to move around from one issue set to another — there has arisen a perverse incentive structure for some intelligence officers to angle their careers for their own personal benefit. That means collectors seeking out specialized target sets or professional relationships that will have utility in their future private sector careers and analysts engaging in something akin to a 24-hour media cycle in which they all write on the same obvious topic simultaneously. The competition for recognition, promotion, and financial reward is pervasive throughout the intelligence enterprise, and it provides cover for some of the most blatant abuses of waste and fraud. It drives the quality of production to the lowest common denominator, as many practitioners seek to avoid taking any risk or initiative, resulting in a duplication of effort that is mere redundancy at best and outright plagiarism at worst.

Indeed, the problem was present almost from the beginning, as the different intelligence agencies sought to defend their remit and expand their responsibilities as defined in the 1947 National Security Act. Competition and the resulting duplication of effort have persisted despite numerous task forces and commissions designed to tackle the problem. This is how you end up with situations like the one reported in the Daily Wire last year, in which an unclassified newsletter issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) exhorted intelligence officers to avoid terms like “Islamic-Extremist” or “Radical Islamists” for fear of offending minority communities. The problem, as Senator Tom Cotton so accurately pointed out, may start with DEI but then goes far beyond it: “Our intelligence agencies should spend their time finding terrorists, not worrying about whether they will offend them.”

If we only understand the problem as DEI, then we blind ourselves to the fact that there is a deeper structural problem at work that will lead to similar situations in years to come. There are too many self-proclaimed experts with too little actual expertise, all competing for attention and chasing after the same storyline, concerned more about fitting in with the latest fad in Washington than wading into the murky details of the very real threats and challenges the country faces. It was just as true for intelligence officers under Democratic administrations who declared themselves experts in “atrocity prevention” or “climate intelligence” as it was for those under Republican administrations who styled themselves experts in “ungoverned spaces” and the “gray zone.” The fact that there can be droves of ambitious intelligence officers posturing for promotion by adopting modish catchphrases that are little more than coded political language for what should be routine forms of analytical content is a sign of the rot.

Any attempt to identify waste and fraud in the IC must begin by examining a very granular level of daily routine and then working outward to see how any one action truly does or does not contribute to an outcome, before asking whether an individual or process is really necessary. All the effort goes into the production and dissemination of timely and impactful intelligence reporting and analysis. Then, there is all the effort that goes into creating the appearance of the production and dissemination of intelligence. How can anyone tell the two apart? It is often just as hard for an intelligence manager to tell if an employee is making a valuable contribution as it is for the outside observer due to the way some employees hide their wasteful or fraudulent behavior behind the specialized nature of the work, the wide range of roles these agencies perform, and the convoluted ways in which intelligence activities feed into the policymaking process.

Moreover, intelligence agencies are just as much taken up with the task of pursuing national security priorities as they are with collecting and analyzing information as a form of social capital, using the sheer size of their databases and production numbers to create the appearance of knowledge and therefore the right to moderate and arbitrate policy discussions. That is a real challenge for Trump administration officials tasked with reducing inefficiencies.