Good Start, Tulsi Gabbard

To my mind, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) should not exist. Like the Department of Homeland Security, it arose out of Congress’s natural political impulse, following the 9/11 atrocities, to appear to be doing . . . something. Lawmakers diagnosed that the principal government dereliction had been the failure to ensure that intelligence was shared across agencies. But the main obstruction in that regard had been the reckless Justice Department policy of preventing intelligence agents and criminal investigators from communicating. Most of that problem could be remedied by reversing the policy (which was done). More to the point, if the illness is lack of coordination across 17 agencies of what’s known as the U.S. intelligence “community,” the cure is not adding yet an 18th bureaucracy.

For that reason, while I can’t claim to have been enthusiastic when President Trump nominated Hawaii’s Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic representative, to head up ODNI, neither was I a full-throated opponent. It’s not exactly that I disagreed with our editorial’s detailed indictment of Gabbard’s lapses in judgment. It’s that I emphatically agreed with the editorial’s first sentence that “the job is not nearly as important as it sounds” — although it is more important than it should be because it exists. (I know Elon Musk is a Tulsi fan, and I’m sure there are necessary executive tasks she’d be quite good at; but if he and his DOGE-ies really want to pare down Leviathan, ODNI would have been a good place to start.)

About the Author

Andrew C. McCarthy

Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at National Review Institute, an NR contributing editor, and author of Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency.

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To my mind, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) should not exist. Like the Department of Homeland Security, it arose out of Congress’s natural political impulse, following the 9/11 atrocities, to appear to be doing . . . something. Lawmakers diagnosed that the principal government dereliction had been the failure to ensure that intelligence was shared across agencies. But the main obstruction in that regard had been the reckless Justice Department policy of preventing intelligence agents and criminal investigators from communicating. Most of that problem could be remedied by reversing the policy (which was done). More to the point, if the illness is lack of coordination across 17 agencies of what’s known as the U.S. intelligence “community,” the cure is not adding yet an 18th bureaucracy.

For that reason, while I can’t claim to have been enthusiastic when President Trump nominated Hawaii’s Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic representative, to head up ODNI, neither was I a full-throated opponent. It’s not exactly that I disagreed with our editorial’s detailed indictment of Gabbard’s lapses in judgment. It’s that I emphatically agreed with the editorial’s first sentence that “the job is not nearly as important as it sounds” — although it is more important than it should be because it exists. (I know Elon Musk is a Tulsi fan, and I’m sure there are necessary executive tasks she’d be quite good at; but if he and his DOGE-ies really want to pare down Leviathan, ODNI would have been a good place to start.)

About the Author

Andrew C. McCarthy

Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at National Review Institute, an NR contributing editor, and author of Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency.