By Jasmin Parrado
After President Donald Trump fired National Security Agency director Gen. Timothy Haugh and deputy director Wendy Noble on April 3, it has become undeniably clear that politicization of intelligence is occurring at a concerning rate.
The question of political loyalty bleeding into a deteriorating U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) and escalating tensions between states is now blaring, and the consequences of that could be immense, especially on the global scale.
Politicization hasn’t helped America’s foreign policy case, either. The debris of it in global politics makes a long list, with the administration enacting tariffs on other countries, denying the woes of a recently leaked group chat that discussed classified airstrike operations in Yemen and citing disproved claims about the Venezuelan government having gang liaisons.
Jeffrey Rogg, senior research fellow at the University of South Florida’s Global and National Security Institute, explained how politicization is traditionally seen as distortion of intelligence for political purposes.
A notorious case of politicization can be traced back to the 2000s, when former President George W. Bush’s administration ran the public narrative that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD), despite agencies presenting evidence that proved otherwise, Rogg said.
Unsurprisingly enough, the Bush administration found no WMDs, and that initiative turned into an intelligence failure that would enter the history books and strain both domestic and foreign relations for the next decade.
Most importantly, it served as yet another cautionary tale for the IC in a new millennium marked by failures that resulted in lethal errors, from surprise terrorist attacks to wars and invasions that caused mass casualties.
Rogg believes that the breed of politicization we’re seeing now is different than what has existed in past decades.
“What we’re talking about today is what I would call the most insidious of politicization,” Rogg said. “That’s when intelligence is used for partisan purposes, meaning that it’s not just used for policy purposes, like to create the conditions to go to war. It’s used in a back-and-forth between American domestic politics.”
Arturo Jimenez-Bacardi, National Security Archive research affiliate and international relations professor at USF St. Petersburg, believes that politicization plagues the entire system of intelligence in a chain reaction.
“The problem with politicizing intelligence is that you end up getting a worse-quality product,” Bacardi said. “It’s more likely to then lead to intelligence failures. And if you have more intelligence failures, it’s more likely to lead to policy failures. No one wants that.”
Usually, politicization can involve cherry-picking what documents to declassify for the public or dismissing what analysts have to say if their intelligence disagrees with policy objectives, Bacardi explained.
But that’s not all.
“Another major way that presidents have tried to politicize intelligence is by removing high-ranking intelligence analysts and placing individuals that they consider to be more loyal,” Bacardi said.
Trump’s motive for firing National Security Council (NSC) employees was reportedly spurred by the suggestions of far-right political activist and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, who claims she presented a list of NSC officials she deemed “disloyal” to Trump.
Additionally, a big development in this case is how the president initially aimed to fire IC employees in March who worked on DEI-based programs, another part of his larger initiative to remove DEI from federal departments and systems.
In the IC, issues of bias and groupthink are usually narrowed under protocols and meetings that address a wide range of perspectives on the goals, thoughts and intentions of foreign leaders.
So, the drive against federally instated diversity programs calls for a check on the demographics within the analyst populace. If intelligence agencies become homogenous through their hires and policy missions, intelligence assessments could potentially suffer.
“What you end up having is a lower quality product, because you’re no longer having a neutral assessment of the available evidence,” Bacardi said.
Biases such as mirroring, in which analysts believe a leader might do something only because the U.S. would in the same situation, can steer the IC away from making accurate observations for future foreign policy goals.
These elements could be making the intelligence community and the nation especially vulnerable by the moment. By shifting the focus to heightened political loyalty and prompting tensions between the U.S. and other states, the grounds for a profound intelligence failure are arguably set.
“If you are distracted with narrow political games, if the senior leadership doesn’t trust the intelligence officials who are supposed to have warned them about things like strategic surprise, then this is when you can have really catastrophic consequences,” Rogg said.
The Signal Group Chat Leak
In that case, the country often turns to matters of security and counterintelligence — ways of protecting the nation against potential threats or disagreements.
But when Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, CIA director John Ratcliffe and other White House and IC staff discussed tactical airstrike plans in a Signal group chat in March, now dubbed SignalGate, that thought went out the window.
The use of Signal alone should have been a red flag from the beginning, but not for the reasons everyone is thinking, Rogg believes.
“Most people are focusing on the partisan issue here,” Rogg said. “That’s such low hanging fruit to me. It’s very easy to say, and it’s not very insightful.”
Rogg explained that perpetrators from both Republican and Democratic administrations have committed security violations. Where the actual problem lies is in outdated methods of information relay.
“Do we need to update our way of communicating in national security? I would say the signal chat says, ‘Yes we do,’” Rogg said. “[The current model] is just not realistic and sustainable for national security communication anymore. We need to update, and we have the ability to. But I think part of the reason we don’t have the will is because people in bureaucracies are stuck in old patterns of behavior.”
Classified IC communications are supposed to be limited to specific devices and networks, often concealed from open-source spaces used among the public. That being said, it can be difficult to rein in the wild digital landscape, and that can be seen in discussions of recent covert cyber operations from states like Russia, Rogg explained.
Not to mention, breaches from home base have made their mark in our country. The very crutch of the American public’s broader understanding of domestic digital surveillance came from the leak of the Snowden files in 2013.
Though some cyber leaks have aided conversations of ethics and transparency, that risk of breach now looms over all communications. That can leave the IC more vulnerable than ever, if not addressed. And with partisan discourse fueling and intensifying the politicization problem in the IC, it seems that problem won’t be spotlighted anytime soon.
Simply put, when other nations see how our current administration’s IC employment is currently fueled by proof of loyalty and a penchant for using open-source software, what will they think?
What is our place in international relations if we are barely able to form at least one cohesive institution of straight, nonpoliticized knowledge in our country? The IC should have remained so; it looks like that is clearly not the most viable option anymore.
