U.S. Intelligence Community: Providing Intelligence Support for Future Conservative Presidents

Key Chapter Title List

1. Overview and Mission Statement
2. Challenges and Reforms of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence
3. Mission Execution and Bureaucratic Reform of the Central Intelligence Agency
4. Planning and Employment of Covert Actions
5. Preventing the Misuse of Intelligence for Partisan Purposes
6. Focus on China: Transformation, Reform, and Resources
7. The Role of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center
8. Analytic Integrity and Strategic Intelligence Analysis
9. Obligatory Sharing and Real-Time Audit Capabilities
10. Cover and the Privacy Shield Agreement in the Digital Age
11. The President's Daily Brief and the National Intelligence Council
12. The Intelligence Community Chief Information Officer and Technical Issues
13. The Importance and Strategy of the Space Domain
14. An Unfinished Experiment

Document Introduction

This report is a key component of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, aiming to provide a potential future conservative president with a comprehensive and systematic blueprint for reforming the U.S. Intelligence Community. The report begins by clarifying its core mission: to provide the president, in an apolitical manner, with the knowledge and tools necessary to strengthen the U.S. Intelligence Community to defend national sovereignty, security, and prosperity. The report recognizes that the Intelligence Community currently faces complex challenges from China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. In particular, China has become a peer competitor to the United States in strategic domains and even leads in some aspects, necessitating a fundamental transformation of the intelligence architecture to meet the era of great power competition.

The report is rigorously structured. It first analyzes the design flaws and power dilution of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) as the coordination hub of the Intelligence Community, tracing its evolution since its establishment post-9/11. It points out its predicament of becoming a bureaucratic fifth wheel due to ambiguous statutory authority. To address this, the report recommends amending Executive Order 12333 to clarify and strengthen the DNI's authority in budget execution, cyber mission coordination, open-source intelligence integration, and security clearance reform, enabling the DNI to lead the entire Intelligence Community effectively, akin to an orchestra conductor.

Regarding the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the report emphasizes the need to ensure it provides non-partisan intelligence and executes the president's covert action directives. It proposes reshaping its culture by changing leadership, reforming bureaucratic structures, redirecting resources (away from "woke" cultural agendas and back to an adventurous spirit similar to the Office of Strategic Services), and optimizing recruitment and promotion mechanisms. On covert actions, the report suggests that a new president should immediately conduct a comprehensive 60-day review upon taking office to assess the effectiveness of existing operations, consider broader utilization of capabilities from departments like the Department of Defense, and establish clear evaluation metrics to prevent misuse.

The report dedicates significant space to discussing the core issue of preventing the politicization of intelligence, citing cases such as the 2016 Russia investigation and the 2020 Hunter Biden laptop incident. It notes that the credibility of the Intelligence Community has been damaged by politicized actions at senior levels. To address this, the report proposes a series of norms to rebuild trust, including: intelligence leaders must strictly maintain political neutrality and limit public appearances; holding those who abuse their authority accountable and revoking their security clearances; strengthening the appropriateness of congressional oversight; and reforming the oversight mechanisms of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (especially Section 702) to prevent abuse against domestic political targets.

Addressing the China challenge is placed at the center of the reforms. The report argues for a whole-of-government approach, integrating intelligence, technology, economic, and supply chain resources. It recommends strengthening the CIA's China Mission Center, cautiously expanding intelligence sharing with Asia-Pacific allies (e.g., exploring models like the Nine Eyes or the Quad), and significantly increasing the intelligence budget targeting China. The role of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC) needs to be elevated to coordinate responses to asymmetric threats that extend beyond traditional espionage into technology, economic, and academic domains.

The report also delves into other key reform areas: rebuilding strategic analysis capabilities to address puzzles, not just secrets; establishing an obligatory sharing policy to accelerate the flow of cyber threat intelligence; addressing over-classification and investing in modern declassification technology; tackling the challenge of providing effective cover for intelligence personnel in the digital age; taking a firm stance against the EU on the Privacy Shield data agreement issue; reforming the compilation and delivery process of the President's Daily Brief (PDB); and ensuring the Intelligence Community maintains a leading edge in the emerging operational domain of space, enhancing integration with the Department of Defense and the commercial sector.

Finally, the report characterizes the current Intelligence Community reform as an unfinished experiment, whose originally designed streamlined coordination model has partially degenerated into ineffective bureaucratic layering. The report concludes that a conservative president has the opportunity, through resolute leadership and the use of a limited yet fully empowered coordination design, to return the Intelligence Community to its primary principle of serving national intelligence and security needs, regain public trust, and effectively counter the significant threats posed by state and non-state actors.