American Intelligence Is in Crisis. Where’s Congress?
The intelligence community needs direction, oversight, and empowerment from the legislative branch.
LAST WEEK, THE FIVE EYES intelligence alliance, comprising the United States, the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, issued a public warning that frontier artificial-intelligence models will be capable of large-scale cyberattacks—not in years, but in months. Such attacks could shut down a regional power grid, ground a national air-traffic control system, take a missile-defense radar offline, or corrupt the financial databases on which the American economy runs.
That warning landed on a U.S. government that weeks earlier had deprived the National Security Agency of its most powerful tool to do anything about that threat. Earlier this month, the Trump administration forced Anthropic to pull back its Mythos model, including from the NSA, whose analysts had been using it to identify cyber vulnerabilities in classified U.S. networks. The administration is in a public feud with the company that is more political than technical.
That is the pattern, and it is the point. The threat picture is getting demonstrably worse. And the U.S. government is doing the opposite of what would be required to keep up.
On June 14, the Congress let Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act expire. It is the most productive foreign intelligence collection tool the United States has, but Congress refused to reach an agreement to extend it and the president made its renewal hostage to an unrelated voter-ID bill. Without it, the intelligence community will have a harder time tracking the type of catastrophic attack the Five Eyes warned about this week.
Add to that the president’s installation of Bill Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency with no national security background, as acting director of national intelligence, after pulling his nominee, Jay Clayton, who is generally viewed as qualified, to extract Senate confirmation of one of Trump’s personal lawyers for an unrelated post. Pulte is now running the U.S. intelligence community without a hearing, without Senate confirmation, and without meaningful congressional oversight.
In his first week, Pulte fired political appointees close to the previous director and sent dozens of detailees back to their home agencies. The downsizing piece is not crazy on its own. ODNI has grown bloated. And no one should mourn the end of Tulsi Gabbard’s tenure at the agency. But this trim is not being done on the merits. It is being done by a Trump loyalist with a mandate to clear the place out.
So where is Congress in all of this? AWOL.
There has been Republican muttering. Sen. Lindsey Graham called allowing FISA to lapse “playing with fire, particularly in the middle of the war with Iran.” Senate Majority Leader John Thune has said the Senate should move the Section 702 reauthorization without the voter-ID bill attached. None of those positions has produced action.
The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, which I helped write, passed in 2004 with strong bipartisan majorities and President George W. Bush’s signature. It was Congress’s answer to the central finding of the 9/11 Commission: that our intelligence agencies were not sharing what they knew. We have not had a successful catastrophic attack on the homeland since. That record was not luck.
The Constitution is clear about where these powers sit. Article I gives Congress the authority to organize and fund the executive branch, to confirm its senior officials, and to authorize the surveillance powers Section 702 conveys. None of that authority is optional, and none of it is something a president can take by default if Congress declines to exercise it. But that is precisely what is happening, and what will keep happening, until Congress does its job.
The Five Eyes have told us, in plain language, that the attack window is measured in months. Confirm a serious DNI. Reauthorize Section 702, clean. Restore the intelligence community’s access to the tools it needs to defend us. Stop being a bystander as our Constitution and our intelligence architecture are dismantled together.
 | A guest post by
|