It’s a complicated dynamic, but not so complicated that we cannot understand the motives. Prior to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard taking office, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence had no problems with the DNI office. However, with DNI Gabbard now stretching her wings to diminish the CIA, suddenly the Senate seeks to control the DNI.
Tulsi Gabbard had been shrinking the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) since she took office; from 2,000 to roughly 1,600 and dropping. SSCI Chairman Tom Cotton now wants to cap the office staff at 650, sending the remaining intelligence community operatives back to the CIA and other agencies.
Additionally, Chairman Cotton does not want the DNI to investigate or generate its own intelligence. Cotton demands the ODNI just accept and regurgitate the intelligence Tulsi Gabbard would be given by the other agencies; no independent review of analysis permitted. All of these actions push the Intelligence Community power center back into the CIA and away from the prying eyes of the DNI. That’s the SSCI motive.
WASHINGTON DC – A top Republican senator is proposing a sweeping overhaul of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, slashing the workforce of an organization that has expanded since it was created in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Under a bill by Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, the chair of the Intelligence Committee, the ODNI’s staff of about 1,600 would be capped at 650, according to a senior Senate aide familiar with the proposed legislation.
ODNI’s workforce was about 2,000 in January, but National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard has already overseen a reduction of about 20% as part of the Trump administration’s drive to shrink the federal workforce. The reduction in the staff Gabbard oversees could weaken her role in the intelligence bureaucracy.
[…] The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, exposed a failure to share information across spy agencies with catastrophic results. As a result, Congress established the ODNI to oversee all of the country’s 18 intelligence services, including the CIA, and manage bureaucratic turf wars from a complex outside Washington, D.C.
What started as a relatively small office under the national intelligence director in 2005 has expanded over the last 20 years to include in-house analysis teams and centers focused on counterterrorism and counterintelligence. Cotton has described the ODNI as a bloated bureaucracy that should return to its original mission of coordinating the work of other spy agencies instead of producing its own reports and duplicating other agencies’ efforts.
“Congress in no way wanted yet another unruly bureaucracy layered on top of an already bureaucratic intelligence community,” Cotton said at Gabbard’s confirmation hearing in late January. “Unfortunately, 20 years later, that’s exactly what the ODNI has become.”
Gabbard herself expressed support for downsizing the ODNI’s workforce at the hearing, saying she would work with Cotton and other lawmakers to eliminate “redundancies and bloating.” (read more)
In the lead up to the election I outlined what the DNI could do with untapped power already given to the office. DNI Tulsi Gabbard has been following a path close to that outline. Now, we see Washington DC responding to that affirmed power structure and actively working to neuter the DNI. A very predictable outcome.
The only intelligence silo more corrupt than the CIA is the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that oversees it.
Way down South in the Land of Cotton
Lives a Senator who sure is Rotten.
Sure will be interesting to see who aligns with Cotton.
I bet Mark “Horse Face” Warner goes “bipartisan”.
What is it with VA senators and horses? LOL
Thom Tillis has entered the chat . . .
Because his wife has been CIA for decades. I am really starting to hate Cotton(DC establishment).
MASSIVE wifey-poo CIA conflict of interest … and … big-time explanation of Cotton MAGA betrayal.
Go Away Traitor !!!
Cotton was NEVER MAGA. He has always been a neoconservative globalist.
I do not trust Cotton nor anyone who has served on the SSCI. This includes Rubio. The CIA needs to be broken up, and separate competing intelligence agencies developed. This would spur competition and insure partisan intelligence agencies would die through lack of funding. The existing CIA is a joke with DIA beating it hands down.
IIRC, the ODNI was conceived (at least in what was said openly) as a “clearinghouse” to coordinate the numerous (28?) different bloated elements of the “Intelligence Community”, to plug gaps exposed by 9-11 failures and Jamie Gorelick’s disasterous “wall of separation”. ODNI was not meant to creating intel or intel analysis, but to identify redundancy and inconsistencies; to connect the dots among intel products, and to make sure intel products were put in the right hands on a timely basis.
Whether Cotton’s current motive is aggrandizing CIA power, weakening Gabbard, pruning a bloated bureaucracy, or something else, his proposal seems consistent with the original concept of the ofice. Cutting back all the intel agencies, and consolidating or eliminating some outright, would keep things in balance.
Not what the article says:
“… Tom Cotton now wants to cap the office staff at 650, sending the remaining intelligence community operatives back to the CIA and other agencies.”
Doesn’t sound like, ” Cutting back all the intel agencies, and consolidating or eliminating some outright….” to me.
Like any bomber pilot will tell you the heaviest flack will be right over the target! Well, unless the Israeli IDF has been there first! In that case its, “Drop them boys and lets go home Last one home buys first round at the O Club!
Sorry if this was ambiguous. Most of the ODNI staff are likely seconded from CIA, etc. (just like NSC staffers). Cotton wants all but 650 of them returned to the agencies they came from. “Cutting back all the intel agencies” is my desire, not Senator Cotton’s.
If Cotton really wants to help his former employer, the CIA, he should demand that they cut their bellybuttons by 2/3rds, not the DNI staff. The CIA is bloated, full of fools and do-nothings. Those useless layabouts will always wind up doing no-good, becoming torturers and murderers and thieves. They do nothing for the good of the United States, nor the good of the American people. The CIA needs to be gutted.
Tom Cotten has now shown his true beliefs and intentions.
Yeah, I have been a supporter of both Cotton and Paul over the years but that support is waning rapidly recently. Cotton hasn’t been at all impressive as head of Senate Intel and Paul is acting more like an economic ideolog all the time. Need some more MAGA Senators next time around.
Problem is that they’re there too long with no accountability.
Think about it … They get $200,000/year, plus a very hefty expense account, plus huge campaign donations (reportable and via private bank accounts in the Caymans, they never have to consult with We the People about anything (like the outrageously costly scam Green New Deal), they just ignore the Constitutional REQUIREMENT for an annual, appropriated budget, they lie incessantly & get away with it … Who would that arrangement NOT corrupt?
It flies in the face of normal business practice,with normal mechanisms that assure proper productivity & accountability, limits on exercise of power, merit reviews, etc. Service in Congress erodes what little integrity a representative has.
We need serious campaign finance reform, as a Constitutional amendment, with gross oversight. A CA because it will be presented transparently to the people, and needs a 3/4 votes of the states. And can’t be changed by statutory laws of Congress.
A long time ago.
So you are for creating another intelligence behemoth subject to many of the same Deep State type motivations that the Def. Int. Agency, the State Dept., the FBI and the CIA and the rest are subject to, No thanks. The original intent stated by Cotton accurately was to remove the Chinese walls between the gathering agencies. And no one is saying that the Director, in this case Gabbard, could not put their own summary view of intelligence. Look if Tully Gabfest, the pacificist Democrat still, was not in charge of it but say AOC was, then you would be screaming bloody murder so cool it with the Carlson Tucknuts BS.
I knew the scarecrow would reveal his true self.
If I get the gist of the article, Cotton wants the ODNI to put up and shut up. Is that about right?