Australia has no room for complacency as it watches the second Trump Administration upend the US Intelligence Community (USIC). The evident mutual advantages of the US-Australian intelligence partnership and of the Five Eyes alliance more generally are not enough to guarantee preservation of benefits. In addition, Australia’s National Intelligence Community (NIC) will need to adopt a more deliberate and coordinated approach to its relationship with the USIC, centred around agreed national objectives.
Amid the turmoil being experienced in the USIC, and the longer-term challenges for American partner agencies themselves, especially as a result of likely disruption to fragile workforce development pipelines, there will be opportunities for the NIC. As happened after US intelligence reforms in 2004, Australia can learn what works, what doesn’t—and what can be adopted by the NIC, particularly in relation to the utility of the ‘China challenge’ as a potential organising principle. Already, the NIC can note the vital need for intelligence organisations in democratic societies to not just protect reputations for bipartisanship but to keep the trust and confidence of the broader public.
Trump and his spies, the second time around
Donald Trump’s first presidential term was characterised by conflict and tensions between him as a neophyte politician and the USIC. This was exemplified by Trump’s remarks at a 2018 summit in Helsinki, where he appeared to side with President Vladimir Putin over the FBI’s assessment that Moscow had tried to interfere in the 2016 US election. In one regard this estrangement between Trump and the USIC seemed incongruous. A president otherwise so keen to advance US interests through the forceful exercise of American power did not make best use of a policy instrument designed to do just that, the USIC.
The re-elected and emboldened Trump need not make the same mistake (although he might still).
Looking beyond current political debates surrounding his cabinet picks and the handling of broader US government reforms, what will the intelligence community look like in the next four years, and what are the implications for close intelligence allies like Australia?
By the end of Trump’s first term his estrangement from the USIC was confirmed, and it was accentuated by his four years out of office, his legal troubles, which included charges (now discontinued) for mishandling classified material, and an electoral campaign in which he cast intelligence agencies as an inveterate deep state.
More recently, attention has focused on the president’s unorthodox choices for some leadership positions, notably Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence (DNI) and Kash Patel as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. These choices shouldn’t be dismissed lightly. After all, the old axiom holds that personnel is policy, and this is amplified by Trump’s personal loyalty-driven approach to governing. In addition, Trump has come to office the second time around considerably better prepared to staff a new administration than in 2016—and these picks are his, not those of advisers. But in trying to understand what this might mean we should seek further contextualization, especially on where the USIC might be steered by its new captains.
Project 2025, new (and old) faces and implications for US Intelligence
Alongside public statements by the Trump administration and its appointees, another potential source for such context is Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, published in 2023 by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. It should be noted that during the election campaign Trump disavowed knowledge of this conservative think-tank project but he has since re-embraced the manifesto’s authors and recommendations. And Mandate for Leadership’s chapter on intelligence reform offers detail absent from the 2024 Republican Party Platform.
More particularly, that chapter draws heavily on the views of John Ratcliffe, Trump’s former DNI, now director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Ratcliffe’s leadership of the CIA now heightens the significance of his expressed views, suggesting that the manifesto’s policy priorities and prescriptions for CIA (and the USIC generally) will influence the administration’s own.
The chapter is not without its idiosyncrasies and errors. Nonetheless, a close reading of Project 2025 gives insights into the USIC for the next four years, especially through its five consistent themes: politicisation, China, the CIA’s future, technology and centralisation through the Office of the DNI (ODNI).
Politicisation is an unavoidable topic, the bitter fruit of the estrangement in Trump’s first term. Mandate for Leadership makes the case for a return to a politically neutral USIC, but that itself seems challenging in the current environment in which so much is tarred as politicised. The future of the enabling Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is bound up in relitigating past cases that affected individuals in Trump’s orbit. Integrity in analysis is framed by continuing debate over the appropriate emphasis on electoral interference threats from China instead of Russia. One resulting measure recommended in the manifesto is USIC leaders and their agencies withdrawing from the public square. It will be interesting to see whether this recommendation carries through to the new USIC leadership, given the existing public (and very political) profiles of Gabbard and Patel.
The positive mirror image of ‘politicisation’ is responsiveness, and this is borne out in Mandate for Leadership’s case for a more empowered DNI, one who is more directive over the rest of the USIC and responsive to the president. This change would be accompanied by down-sizing and shedding some of the responsibilities ODNI has accumulated since 2004—unsurprisingly, since bloat has been a criticism of ODNI since its establishment. It’s telling that the handful of Republican senators who were initially sceptical about Gabbard’s nomination as DNI were apparently won over by her commitment to just such downsizing.
It’s also worth noting that an invocation to laser focus on the president’s defined needs risks undermining an intelligence community’s important role in seeing over the horizon to unknown unknowns.
Nonetheless, statutory ambiguities have already weakened the ODNI’s authority over budgets, personnel and operations, leaving it unable to resolve interagency rivalries or streamline intelligence activities. According to the manifesto, these deficiencies, compounded by entrenched inefficiencies, have relegated the ODNI to a bureaucratic bottleneck rather than a strategic leader, raising concerns about its ability to address evolving global threats effectively.
Key manifesto recommendations therefore include granting DNI full authority over budgets and personnel to dismantle institutional silos and reduce redundancies. These structural changes would be accompanied by efforts to address cultural issues such as politicisation and overclassifying the secrecy of information, which are said to hinder operational effectiveness.
Where might that more directive DNI drive the USIC? One answer is a more joined up national intelligence effort that sees the generational threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party as an imperative, if not an organising principle. That would certainly be the choice of Ratcliffe, who boasted to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that:
As DNI, I dramatically increased the Intelligence Community’s resources devoted to China. I openly warned the American people that, from my unique vantage point as the official who saw more US intelligence than anyone else, I assessed that China was far and away our top national security threat.
Ratcliffe’s coda—that ‘President Trump has been an incredible leader on this issue, and it is encouraging that a bipartisan consensus has emerged in recent years’—belies the ambiguity otherwise apparent in the new DNI’s own testimony (which gave little insight into her thoughts on the targets of US intelligence) and by both Gabbard and Ratcliffe’s unwillingness to comment on the messiness of the president’s approach to TikTok’s future.
Presumably USIC focus will follow policy priorities, including on China. We’ve already seen other, alternative priorities aired in public: countering the Mexican cartels, the western hemisphere more broadly, and economic intelligence (the reflex of all new governments everywhere when contemplating what intelligence machinery can do for their policy agenda).
The CIA features as prominently in Mandate for Leadership as the ODNI, unlike the other 16 agencies of the USIC. It’s the CIA that stands accused of managerialism run amok, and for which there are calls for the return of an ‘OSS culture’. (The Office of Strategic Services was the CIA’s World War II antecedent. Presumably Mandate for Leadership is referring to the OSS’s famed can-do pioneering spirit and not to its penetration by the Soviets.) Hence Ratcliffe’s clarion call at his nomination hearing:
To the brave CIA officers listening around the world, if all of this sounds like what you signed up for, then buckle up and get ready to make a difference. If it doesn’t, then it’s time to find a new line of work.
Manifestations of this desire for a cultural shift within CIA are found in the manifesto’s argument for greater external and lateral recruitment into the agency, a more ruthless up-or-out approach to promotion, and transfer of various CIA elements and facilities away from Washington DC and northern Virginia.
Perhaps more consequentially, the manifesto makes the case for recalibrating covert action responsibilities away from CIA and towards the Department of Defense (and its ‘certain clandestine capabilities […] that may resemble but far exceed in scale similar capabilities outside of DOD’). Covert action is described as activities ‘to influence political, economic or military conditions abroad, where it is intended that the role of the United States Government will not be apparent or acknowledged publicly’. This aligns with a broader shift in confidence towards the military intelligence agencies, which are seen (fairly or not) as more reliable and responsive than the CIA. This shift has been highlighted in conversations with Republican-aligned national security figures over the past year.
Finally, the newfound alignment between conservative US politics and the US technology sector finds expression in the manifesto’s pushback against the European Union’s data privacy regulations and a warning to the USIC to avoid duplicating technology development by the private sector. Mandate for Leadership also takes to task the current USIC for not adhering to an ‘obligation to share’ relevant intelligence, especially on cyber threats to industry. It similarly echoes the president’s criticisms of over-classification (which, it must be fair, have been bipartisan and broad-ranging for many years). Thus, according to the manifesto, ‘an ODNI-run declassification process that is faster, nimbler, default-to-automated, and larger-scale should be a priority.’
Insights for Washington’s intelligence partners
The above is necessarily a partial view of what will be the next four years for the USIC. Just as a decades-long prioritisation of global counter-terrorism was not on the cards when George W Bush took office in 2001, so events will play their own part in deciding what happens next. But there is a useful foundation from which close intelligence allies like Australia can take some cues.
The USIC will be distracted and inwardly focused, partly because it will be working through contradictory impulses and directives early in this administration. This is where the question of personnel is particularly important. The apparent effort to denude the FBI of its existing leadership and structure, particularly moves to downsize the bureau’s National Security Division (including disbandment of counter-foreign interference efforts, victims of the bad political blood of the past decade), bodes poorly for US counter-intelligence. So too does the call for the FBI to return to crime fighting. Yet these circumstances (and the partisan political climate) don’t suggest that an idea advanced in the past by conservative critics of the FBI, creation of a separate non-law-enforcement security intelligence agency comparable to ASIO or MI5, is likely to come to pass anytime soon.
As for the remainder of the USIC, their workforces are being buffeted by the same forces affecting the wider US civil service. Of particular concern are moves to pause entry-level recruitment processes or even to dismiss probationary staff. These kinds of disruption have historically (in the US but also elsewhere) had cascading effects through intelligence agencies over years, indeed even decades, especially for streams requiring careful selection and considerable training (such as for CIA’s Directorate of Operations).
As radical as aspects of the new administration’s approach might appear, there is also a certain (and not always unwelcome) conservatism. For example, Mandate for Leadership rejects expansion of the Five Eyes alliance, a perennial subject of think pieces, favouring instead ‘ad hoc or quasi-formal intelligence expansion […] amongst nations trying to counter the threat from China’. This underplays the long-term efforts typically required in building effective liaison relationships. But even ad hoc relations might not remain viable. For example, Gabbard has been notably hostile in her past public commentary about Japan’s defence build-up and desire for a closer security relationship with the US. She was given the opportunity to moderate those comments during questioning before the Senate intelligence committee but declined to do so. And we’ve also seen remarks, now walked back, by a separate member of the administration (albeit one from outside of national security policy) about excluding Canada from the Five Eyes.
Gabbard also declined senators’ myriad (almost pleading) opportunities to dissociate herself from her past support for Edward Snowden. That she did not do so only underscored the priority she accords to her interpretation of civil rights, also reflected in her answers to the other matter of importance to those same senators: the continuation of FISA’s section 702. The other priority apparent from the new DNI’s remarks, and from related administration actions, is a more forward leaning approach to declassification and over-classification.
Taken together, these emphases are likely to engender some concerns among close intelligence partners used to sharing sensitive secrets by default. It would be natural in this situation for those partners to take stock of existing relationships with the USIC, especially where, in parallel, there are perhaps new divergences on stated policy objectives.
At the same time, the mutual advantages of the Five Eyes relationship (now almost 80 years old), including in the advancement of US interests, are readily identifiable. But this shouldn’t be a reason for complacency. Such demonstration of obvious advantage may still not be enough to insulate relationships from unwelcome developments. After all, the single best example of the US gaining from an intimate security arrangement with a close partner remains the North American Aerospace Defence Command, a US-Canadian military organisation, better known as NORAD, that stands ready to warn of nuclear attack. Yet such a close relationship has done little to shield Canada from recent actions by the White House.
What will be required is a careful and coordinated approach from the Australian government across all points of the alliance (including intelligence). As always in Canberra, the simplest but also most challenging part of the exercise will be determining and sustaining a clear national (and whole-of-government) objective for that approach to serve.
Recommendations for Australia’s National Intelligence Community
Amidst this turmoil in Washington, there are opportunities for Australia’s NIC also. There will be lessons to be learned from new directions in IC organisation and leadership, just as Australia’s establishment of the Office of National Intelligence was well informed by what went right and wrong in the creation of the US ODNI. This includes the potential value of using China as a central organising principle for an intelligence community that is also required to deal with other persistent, if not as strategic, national security challenges.
There will also be opportunities for cooperation on technology, whether that’s the next frontier of space surveillance (which the manifesto identifies as an opportunity for Five Eyes collaboration) or in addressing the challenge presented to intelligence operations by the burgeoning phenomenon of ubiquitous technical surveillance.
So, the Office of National Intelligence should be thinking about how to engage with a potentially different looking and focussed ODNI. Likewise, Australia’s defence intelligence agencies should be thinking about an even more important engagement role, if there is a swing in confidence and influence within the US system from the civilian to the military.
More broadly, it will be incumbent on Australia’s NIC to closely monitor US policy changes and evaluate their potential effects here. Furthermore, as we adjust to those changes and continue to demonstrate mutual advantage from the intelligence partnership, we need to prioritise investing in truly sovereign intelligence capabilities for Australia—both as a hedge against the unknowable future and as a tangible and valuable contribution to the continuing partnership.
We would also do well to learn from experience in the US and redouble existing commitments to a NIC that enjoys not only bipartisan support but also the trust and confidence of the Australian public beyond Canberra. This includes when negotiating the complex national security (and unavoidably political) challenges presented by foreign interference and disinformation.
