Two former leaders of the House Intelligence Committee say President Trump is right to push for reforms to the “bloated” intelligence community, even though Trump’s team has downplayed reports that reform is in the works.
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Jane Harman and Peter Hoekstra, the ranking Democrat and Republican chairman of the committee, wrote in the Wall Street Journal Sunday that they helped create the Office of the Director of National Intelligence after 9/11. But they said years later, “a bureaucracy has grown around it” that has again put the U.S. behind the times.
“The threat landscape has evolved,” they wrote. “An age of information warfare poses different challenges than the ones we confronted in 2004, when our chief enemy was a top-down, traditionally run al Qaeda.”
They said that while some new efforts to modernize the agency, “ODNI, designed to rise above the intelligence bureaucracy, is not as agile as we hoped it would be.”
“The more ODNI grows, the less quickly it can move,” they wrote. “It took the private cyber security firm Crowdstrike a month to investigate the digital break-in at the Democratic National Committee and publish a detailed report attributing the hack to Russia.”
“It took the intelligence community several months to consolidate around the same assessment,” they added. “Rumored disagreements between the CIA and FBI, which leaked into the press, fed the fog of Russian disinformation.”
They also said former Sen. Dan Coats, R-Ind., has a mandate to “streamline his office” if confirmed as Trump’s DNI director.
