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authorities—to break institutional silos that had caused past intelligence integration failures.

Originally envisioned by the 9/11 Commission as a strengthened, authoritative position, the final congressionally negotiated product signed by President Bush has led to ambiguous and vague authorities that are dependent on who is selected as DNI and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director and their level of support from the White House and National Security Council (NSC). 9/11 Commission Executive Director Philip Zelikow warned in a 2004 hearing that creating a new agency “lacking any existing institutional base...would require authorities at least as strong as those we have proposed or else it would create a bureaucratic fifth wheel that would make the present situation even worse.”® The ODNI has become that bureaucratic fifth wheel about which Zelikow warned.

For example, under the Bush Administration’s initial legislative proposal, the CIA Director would have been under the “authority, direction, and control” of the DNI and no longer the head of an autonomous agency. Additional mechanisms envisioned full budget authority for the DNI, including within DOD’s intelligence components, as opposed to coordinating authority. Through arduous “sausage-making” and relatively quick negotiations, lawmakers produced statutorily vague authorities that traded away the DNI’s ability to direct budgetary authority across the entire IC, including DOD, and left the CIA a subordinate but independent agency with duties to report to the DNI without explicit directing authority.

These statutory developments were what led President Bush’s first choice to serve as DNI, Robert Gates, to turn down the position. In discussions with the White House over the post, Gates noted that the “legislation weakened the leadership of the community” and that “instead of a stronger person, you ended up with a weaker person because the DNI had no troops and no additional powers really on the budget, hiring, and firing.”’ Gates noted that success would require the President to “make explicit publicly that the DNI is head of the Intelligence Community, not some budgeter or coordinator,” and that “[t]he position’s only prayer of success is for the president to say plainly...how he sees the job. Without his explicit mandate...the endeavor is doomed to fail.”®

One of the two DNIs confirmed by the Senate during the Trump Administration, John Ratcliffe, acknowledged that Gates’s theoretical concerns became the practical reality that he inherited:

Prior DNIs were the head of the IC only on paper and were routinely accustomed to yielding IC actions and decisions to the preferences of the CIA and other agencies. My ability to begin reversing that capitulation was accomplished solely because President Trump made it repeatedly clear to the entire national security apparatus that he expected all intelligence matters to go through the DNI.°