In The Middle Of A War, The Trump Administration Has Cut National Security Staffing In Half

from the one-eyed-jack-asses dept

The on-again, off-again, new forever war we’ve been cursed with because Donald Trump felt people just weren’t paying attention to him enough is going to be headache for years to come. Trump assumes that if he acts like a bully, everyone will just back down. But now he’s dealing with a regime just as willing to go to extremes, which makes this war look more like a knife fight in a jail yard than anything worth forcing other people to die for.

Since Trump doesn’t like to hear anything that might undermine his preconceptions, he’s been notoriously resistant to national security briefings since his first term in office. Trump always assumes he’s the smartest person in the room, even though he’s never the most alert person in the room.

Making sure he only hears what he wants to hear is a full-time job for everyone surrounding the president. And when a toady one step closer to the throne senses someone might say something that upsets the boss, they grab the deck chairs and move them around.

Consequently, the desire for unquestioning loyalty and the ability to be forgettable enough that no one will remember them when they’re gone has given us an insanely stupid succession of people chosen to be the Director of National Intelligence.

Tulsi Gabbard — his first pick — jumped straight to MAGA from the Democratic Party. This absurd abandonment of principles was repaid by Trump pressuring her out of the DNI position after it became clear she didn’t agree with all of Trump’s off-the-cuff assertions about the threat posed by Iran. Not that she hadn’t proven to be pretty much useless — if not actually dangerous — anywhere else in the federal government before then, but this exit meant she wouldn’t be doing anything else for as long as Trump still controls the White House.

As the Trump administration failed to sell MAGA GOP members on re-upping the surveillance program they were all suing about only months ago, the president elevated another one of his buddies to the DNI position.

Enter Bill Pulte. 

Trump on Tuesday named Pulte – currently director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) and chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – to replace current DNI Tulsi Gabbard, who announced her resignation last month. Pulte lacks any intelligence, military, or congressional experience.  

That’s not relevant experience. But relevant experience no longer matters. What does matter is asking not what you can do for your country, but what you can do for Trump.

This is particularly concerning because of Pulte’s history of using private information held by the government as a political weapon. In his FHFA role, he has accused several of the President’s political foes and targets – including New York State Attorney General Letitia James, U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook – of mortgage fraud based on private data held by his agency.  

Pulte’s subservience wasn’t enough to keep him permanently employed, something I hope will eat away at him for the rest of his life. Trump already had an actual nominee lined up: Jay Clayton. Clayton is now perhaps best known for refusing to say who won the 2020 election, which makes it clear he’s here to serve Trump, rather than the country’s national security interests. But it didn’t stop him from being approved this week.

But Pulte did serve one purpose during his temporary tenure as the Director of National Intelligence.

The president in early June tapped federal mortgage regulator Bill Pulte, a political ally with no prior national security experience, to be acting director of national intelligence. Trump said at the time that he wanted Pulte to “start the process” of eliminating some workers.

To be fair, this was hardly a process that needed to be “started.” Under Tulsi Gabbard, staffing at all intelligence agencies that report to the ODNI had shrunk from 2,000 to 1,300. But at the ODNI itself, jobs still seemed pretty safe. Until just recently.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has shrunk more than is publicly known in recent weeks, losing about 200 personnel to firings and reassignments since June 1, according to data the Trump administration shared with Congress this week.

The cuts are the latest to hit ODNI, which was created to oversee and coordinate all U.S. spy agencies but has been targeted by President Donald Trump and many Republicans in Congress. 

That’s 200 firings/reassignments in just the last month. The war with Iran has been ongoing since February 28th, triggered by US air strikes on the nation. Despite the occasional Truth Social post declaring outright victory, the war drags on and it doesn’t appear the administration is capable of closing it out without caving to a long list of Iranian demands.

So, of course, this is the time to be escalating the dismissal of national intelligence personnel. When the threat level is the highest, the administration continues its politically motivated purges, putting everyone in this nation (and the nations around the war zone) at increased risk of attack.

And this is political. The people getting purged aren’t people who call Trump “sir” and the Defense Department the “Department of War.” The people who actually serve a valuable purpose in protecting this nation from all threats are being removed because they might stumble across evidence that indicates this administration is bringing this country down from the inside.

Trump has often maintained a hostile posture toward professional intelligence personnel and their agencies, claiming they tried to undermine him in his first term, particularly with the compiling of reports on Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election to aid his campaign. The president has dismissed intelligence analysis on a range of issues, from North Korea’s nuclear policy to Iran’s likely reaction to the attacks the U.S. and Israel launched in February.

Trump only wants people who nod, cower, and obey. The people around him who desperately want to keep their jobs are throwing anyone not sufficiently MAGA-cooked under the nearest bus and immediately letting Trump know they’ve disappeared the dissidents.

An entire nation could burn and the only thing these people would say is that the nation’s burning was necessary to save the Republic that’s being flipped by no-bid construction crews into a vainglorious edifice worthy only of a tyrant. This administration is incapable of managing crises. But it’s super-great at creating them. If we’re lucky, we’ll be able to look back at this as a turning point in US history. If we’re not, we won’t get to look back at it at all.

Filed Under: bill pulte, donald trump, failure, iran war, jay clayton, national security, odni, trump administration, tulsi gabbard