Do we really need a Director for National Intelligence (DNI)?
In my view, the answer is a resounding “yes.” Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. It’s the DNI’s mission that matters. And given that mission, whatever that is, the DNI must be staffed to provide and/or preserve the human capability needed to accomplish that mission.
So that’s the real question. Just what exactly is that mission? And that’s something that we just don’t know, in part because that mission is unclear even 20-plus years after the Office of the DNI (ODNI) was first established.
Much of that ambiguity can be blamed on the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (IRTPA). That same law, which, among other things, created the position and the supporting ODNI in the first place, is vague and inconsistent in that regard, possibly because of the political environment at the time. But as a result, that law left the DNI with an ambiguous and contradictory mission. And that ambiguity has staffing consequences.
The DNI’s original mission was ambiguous
Two things are clear from all of this. First, we still need an ODNI if we want to create (in the words of former DNI Mike McConnell) a “culture of collaboration” and information sharing amongst the 17 agencies and six separate cabinet departments that still exist. Before that intelligence gets to the president. In theory, that “culture of collaboration” will mitigate the chances of another 9/11 or similar tragedy. In other words, the DNI position and his or her support office are still valid. Now more than ever.
But secondly, it is also clear that we need those career intelligence officers, the military members, career civil servants and government contractors who staff and/or oversee those agencies, as well as those who oversee them in the ODNI, to be able to “speak truth to power” without fear of losing their jobs in the process. The new DNI needs to assure this, and it may be his most daunting challenge.
But that’s for another commentary. In terms of the ODNI’s size and scope, we have rejected a single, monolithic Department of Intelligence that consolidates, commands and thus subordinates (as bureaus under it) the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) and the FBI as well as the other intelligence agencies.
Those agencies are today independently ensconced in their various cabinet departments, each with a separate cabinet secretary, chain of command and culture. And while that independence is incoherent, consolidating them under a single secretary is too extreme. That’s what Congress did when it created the Department of Homeland Security, but we also know that unitary structure is a nostalgic fiction in government; when the United States government is in doubt, it tends to reorganize the deck chairs.
As I said, we rejected that model in favor of a more ambiguous mission for the DNI. But like all government bureaucracies, it has grown over time, in part because of mission creep; in other words, it has suffered from plain old bureaucratic bloat. It has also grown because of the actions of subsequent DNIs, who were willingly or unwittingly complicit in that growth. And ODNI’s original staffing levels had to also account for the former CIA Community Management Staff that was in place when we all got there, even though the ODNI’s statutory purpose was far, far different.
Note here that I am not casting any blame for that growth. But it’s time to revisit the ODNI’s original staffing levels. Starting with a thorough “zero-based” mission scrub. That’s something I hope the new DNI, hopefully in partnership with those experts in the two congressional intelligence committees, will undertake.
A “back to the future” mission model?
In so doing, my own view (after all, I was an ODNI plank owner) is that ODNI needs a staff that can support its original premise; in other words, a size and scope that takes it “back to the future” in terms of the people.
What would that future look like? However vague the IRTPA may have been, I think its original drafters intended the DNI and his or her supporting ODNI staff to do one thing: To serve as the president’s principal intelligence advisor.
To many of us, that means an integrator role, with the DNI fusing complicated and sometimes conflicting intelligence inputs – from local law enforcement, the FBI, DHS and their confidential informants; signals and other forms of electronic intelligence from NSA and others; imagery from National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) satellites; financial intelligence from the Treasury Department; human intelligence from the CIA, et cetera – and communicating the result to the president and his or her cabinet.
To belabor the point, all those inputs come from no less than six different cabinet departments, as well as one independent agency (CIA). And the overlaps and gaps among those sources and methods can create “blind spots” that an adversary can exploit. Thus, the DNI’s first responsibility is to fuse those inputs into something coherent to present to the president. In other words, to serve as an integrator.
Not necessarily an independent collector or analyst of their products, although that may be appropriate, but as an entity that can consolidate those judgements from the intelligence community’s various agencies. And at the risk of stating the obvious, that integrator role has staffing implications.
Of course, that requires infrastructure as well, infrastructure that must cut across those independent intelligence agencies, without necessarily superseding them. But that high-wire act, serving as integrator and providing the management infrastructure necessary to do so, is fundamental to the ODNI and its original purpose, and whatever else it may be tasked to do, it needs to be staffed accordingly.
That’s for the new DNI and the relevant folks on the Hill to work out. That’s their job, although experts like me are happy to help them in that regard.
But even as they do that job – and as commentators like me opine on it – their task is compounded by something that many of us have long observed; that is, that the ambiguities in the IRTPA mean that the role of the DNI depends on the personal relationship between him or her and the president, perhaps even more so than usual.
I agree with that, but it’s high time we fixed it and in so doing, clarify the DNI’s mission, preferably in statute, to meet today’s national security threat(s) as best as we humans are able. Our nation’s security depends on it.
Ron Sanders is a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and a retired member of the civil service with more than 20 years as a member of its Senior Executive Service. Among other posts, he served as director of civilian personnel at the Defense Department, chief human resources officer for IRS, associate director of the Office of Personnel Management and Associate Director of National Intelligence/chief human capital officer for the U.S. intelligence community. The opinions expressed in the above post are his and his alone.
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