This is a common theme in Republican administrations dating back to presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. What you do is you break the government, make it very hard for the government to function, and then you loudly announce that the government can’t do anything.
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Department of Defense
5. Establish true alignment between DOD and DHS both to improve the defense of critical U.S. infrastructure and national border integrity and to develop vital information that enables defense against foreign targeted disruptions.”
Restore accountability and public trust. In recent years, public trust in Defense Intelligence has been eroded by, for example, flawed assumptions leading up to our Afghanistan withdrawal, flawed Russia-Ukraine assessments, divergences in relations with key Gulf allies, and voids being filled by Russia and China around the world. For trust to be restored and sustained, officials must be held accountable.
1. Restore DIE critical thinking. Establish mechanisms to restore analytic integrity and return to true intelligence-driven operations. The next Administration should eliminate the conflict of interest in the current customer-based model (in which the customer is always right) by enforcing time-tested procedures that guarantee independent analysis, even if it means challenging policymakers’ assumptions. The Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security’s leadership role should be expanded to include providing analytic top-line views and improve DIE transparency by highlighting diverging views.
2. Elevate the DIE’s voice in national policy discussions, commensurate with the DIE’s 75 percent share of the IC budget. Present defense intelligence to senior policymakers, either independently to avoid all-source bias or in consensus products like the National Intelligence Estimates.
Eliminate peripheral intelligence obligations that do not advance military readiness. In 2019, following the catastrophic 2015 data
breach at the US. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA) accepted transfer of the responsibility to conduct security clearance and suitability investigations for 95 percent of the U.S. government’s civilian workforce. This decision, which grew out of an intention to deconstruct OPM, was wrongheaded on many levels and made the federal bureaucracy dependent on a new overlay of DOD bureaucracy, in a sense instilling DOD control of civilian managers. This function should be returned to OPM except for military security clearance investigations.