Past Directors have NOT been force-full in butting heads with the agencies they oversaw….
The community is political and is about the President….Donald Trump has been wary of it as it’s members have been in a political knife fight with Trump from the start of his admin….His affection for the Putin and Russia does NOT play well within the intelligence communitywhich probably does NOT trust a boss that has dissed them often in the past also….
It remains to be seen if his action will result in any real change …
The reorganization plan was unveiled Wednesday to employees of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and provided to POLITICO by Coats’s staff.
The office, created in the wake of the September 11 attacks to enforce order among the nation’s often-squabbling intelligence agencies, has struggled over the years to exert control over a world dominated by the CIA, FBI, NSA and other large intelligence-gathering agencies with powerful bureaucracies.
The yearlong reorganization effort, driven in part by a survey of employees at ODNI and the agencies it oversees, will focus the office on four major functions: integrating intelligence streams from the various agencies it oversees; allocating resources among the agencies; promoting national security partnerships that include the private sector and foreign intelligence services; and developing strategies to grapple with future threats.
In interviews, Coats and his principal deputy said the ultimate goal is to streamline the office to make it more agile in responding to changing threats and rapidly evolving technology, and to push decision-making out of the top-level offices and down to the lowest logical level of the bureaucracy. Coats briefed the DNI staff on his plans at his Liberty Crossing headquarters on Wednesday, and released a public notice of the transformation initiative late Thursday afternoon.
Although the proposed reorganization will not cut any positions, and will actually promote four new deputy directors, an ODNI spokesman said it is designed to be “resource neutral” by saving money in other ways.
Though Coats and the ODNI have notional authority over the CIA, FBI, NSA and numerous other agencies, influence in the intelligence universe is often dependent on personalities – especially in the Trump era, where relationships with an unpredictable president can count for more than experience or stature in the field. A former ambassador and Republican member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Coats has not been as highly visible among Trump’s senior advisers as former CIA Director Mike Pompeo, who has just been nominated to take over as secretary of state…..
image…TheHill