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Immediately after the inauguration, the President should task the NSC’s Senior Director for Intelligence Programs with conducting a 60-day review of any current covert action findings, including their effectiveness; evaluating new covert actions that might be needed to implement the President’s foreign policy goals; and reporting back to the President. Such an assessment should be conducted independently of the agencies responsible for the actions under review. As part of the review, the Senior Director for Intelligence Programs should identify which departments or agencies, such as the CIA or DOD, are best equipped to achieve the objectives set out in new and existing findings.

After the 60-day review, the President should demand creative thinking and a clear strategy as to how covert action fits within the President’s broader foreign policy strategy, to include possibly modifying or rescinding any current findings, drafting new findings, and streamlining or eliminating needless bureaucracy, particularly at State, to facilitate more expeditious decisions on tactical covert action. Careful thought should be given to the metrics by which the effectiveness of covert action programs will be measured to ensure the appropriate use of government resources and to guard against the possibility of covert action’s being used with little scrutiny in ways that are inconsistent with overt foreign policy goals.

ODNI AND CIA ORGANIZATIONAL RECOMMENDATIONS

The ODNI and CIA operate under authority provided by the Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949,?° which means they have greater latitude than the rest of the federal government with respect to the hiring and firing of personnel. Both organizations and other areas of the IC have struggled from a human resources and talent management standpoint to recruit, onboard, and maintain personnel in a timely fashion to fill the IC’s ever-changing needs. At a time when the Intelligence Community needs significantly more personnel with the proper technical, language-capable, and diverse backgrounds, including applicants from elements of the business community, the incoming Directors of both agencies need to make this effort a top priority.

Past DNIs’ Chiefs of Staff and additional front-office staff historically have come from outside the IC, commonly under a misconstrued “staff-reserve” structure that is intended to avoid a Schedule C designation within the IC. The Director should handpick qualified, properly cleared personnel for front-office and managerial leadership positions, such as the DNI’s Chief of Staff and heads of Legislative Affairs and Strategic Communications, to oversee those divisions with career IC staff reporting to them.

The incoming DNI and CIA Director should also consider changes in the Senior National Intelligence Service (SNIS)/Senior Intelligence Services (SIS). Senior officers should be required to sign mobility agreements that allow ODNI and CIA leadership to move them within the IC every two years if necessary. Many qualified

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and distinguished senior officers serve throughout the IC, but some long-serving generalist officers no longer perform at a high capacity, are management-driven, do not serve the IC’s changing needs, and limit junior officers’ prospects for growth and advancement. An incoming Administration should consider studying and implementing additional requirements as a condition for promotion to GS-15/ SNIS/SIS and explore concepts such as “Up and Out” beginning at the GS-14/15 levels and above for some fields.

The IC should evaluate areas of bloat and underperforming cadre and work with OPM on authority for voluntary separation buyouts. Allowing ODNI and CIA leadership to shrink size and reduce duplication of effort while promoting healthy turnover within their senior ranks would encourage new ideas and perspectives from mid-career officers and, potentially, from employees hired from outside their agencies. The ODNI and CIA should maximize their direct-hire and incentive-building authorities to bring in talented and properly cleared individuals to serve in positions requiring technical, language, and cyber expertise.

Finally, the human resources and talent management systems for onboarding purposes at the ODNI, CIA, and some other elements of the IC are fundamentally broken. For example, according to current CIA Director William Burns, it recently took more than 600 days, on average, for a CIA applicant to receive his or her necessary security clearance.” Although security clearance procedures have been somewhat improved in recent years and Burns has committed CIA to reducing that to no more than 180 days, degradation in other areas of the process has limited the IC’s capacity to attract qualified and needed expertise.

PREVENTING THE ABUSE OF INTELLIGENCE FOR PARTISAN PURPOSES

The intelligence function must be protected from bottom-up and top-down politicization if it is to play its proper role in our national security decision-making process. Unfortunately, both types of politicization have occurred recently to the detriment of the Intelligence Community’s reputation and credibility. More important, the politicization of intelligence risks contributing to policy failures (as we saw with the Iraq War) or even undermining our democratic system here at home.

In particular, the IC must restore confidence in its political neutrality to rectify the damage done by the actions of former IC leaders and personnel regarding the claims of Trump-Russia collusion following the 2016 election and the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop investigation and media revelations of its existence during the 2020 election. But the problem is not confined to the executive branch struggle between the IC and policymakers; it also relates to the IC’s relationship with Congress as evinced by DNI James Clapper’s failure to answer honestly in response to congressional questions about government surveillance programs.