Amid Calls for ‘Overhaul,’ Challenges Facing the Intelligence Community

BOTTOM LINE UP FRONT — President Donald Trump vowed throughout his 2024 campaign that if elected, he would initiate a revamp of the intelligence community (IC). “We will clean out all of the corrupt actors in our national security and intelligence apparatus, and there are plenty of them,” Trump said in November. “The departments and agencies that have been weaponized will be completely overhauled.” Some of Trump’s choices for top IC positions — in particular Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence and Kash Patel as FBI Director — have echoed the President’s calls for dramatic change. 

Institutional change and “overhaul“ can mean many different things, of course, especially for an institution as large and multifaceted as the U.S. intelligence community. As Trump‘s second term gets underway, and with an unprecedented array and diversity of threats facing the country, we asked several members of The Cipher Brief expert network, all longtime veterans of the IC, for their thoughts on the challenges ahead for U.S. intelligence. While they all agreed that change was needed, they differed on the most important challenges – from counterrorism to the China threat, from hybrid warfare to data management in the AI age, and more.