Opinion | You should care about the national security community

Graphic by Easton Clark, Photo Editor

It’s a fair bet to say that America’s national security community doesn’t have a huge level of support from Americans. From the attacks on Civil Rights organizations by the FBI to the countless covert operations against foreign governments undertaken by the CIA, the many actions undertaken by our three-and-four-letter organizations have caused their reputations to plummet over time.

In a collection of recent surveys published by various outlets, few government organizations came out looking favorable. A Gallup poll found that the CIA is viewed favorably by only 30% of Americans, while a Pew Research Center study finds that only 48% of Americans have a favorable view of the FBI.

Even organizations that hold similar responsibilities in safeguarding America have languished in the public eye. The same Gallup poll found that the IRS holds only a 28% approval rating, while the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) stoops even lower at 26%. Meanwhile, Pew Research Center also found that the Department of Justice as a whole holds the approval of only 39% of Americans.

It is completely understandable for Americans to be distrustful of the various intelligence organizations that operate under our flag. One of our greatest strengths as a nation is that, historically, we have had the ability to speak out against our government and its agencies when they have undertaken terrible actions.

For some, it may be to the degree that they now take pleasure in the drastic shake-ups within nearly every federal agency under the current Trump administration. But make no mistake: what we are seeing is not a course correction of the intelligence community, but an undoing of every improvement made to it, to the extent that we are now quantifiably less safe than we were a year ago.

Let’s take a look at three key agencies that have taken a hit since the inauguration: the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the CIA.

Originating as the Bureau of Investigation under J. Edgar Hoover in the 1920s, the FBI has evolved to become the key investigative arm of the DOJ. As mentioned above, it has also historically been exploited to persecute numerous Civil Rights leaders and student groups. Those familiar with these persecutions may then be supportive of Trump’s shakedown of the agency.

But instead of rebuilding trust and confidence in the FBI, Trump seems poised to make it more corrupt than ever. Under the leadership of Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, who are both die-hard Trump loyalists who emerged from the MAGA mediasphere, agents who were in charge of investigations into both Trump’s first term and Republicans linked to the events of January 6 were fired.

Most concerning, however, is the new direction Patel is steering the agency towards. While Patel has denied that he will use the agency to enact political retribution on Trump’s many enemies, the actions of the FBI stand in sharp contrast to that, with one of the most public examples being the threat of FBI agents forcing liberal Texas legislators to return to the state’s capital in order to enact a partisan gerrymandered electoral map ahead of the midterm elections. And while it’s a seemingly more mundane action, Patel’s decision to reorient the FBI towards immigration enforcement will leave Americans vulnerable to areas it was formerly involved in monitoring, such as domestic terrorism and financial crimes.

Unlike the FBI, the DHS is its own organization separate from the DOJ. Founded in the wake of 9/11, its comparatively brief existence has been mired in controversy, with many branding it as a personal militia for the president. And under Trump, it only seems to have gotten worse.

Under former South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, the agency has actually exploded in size and budget. While offices meant to aid legal immigrants and refugees have been shut down (the Office of Immigration Ombudsman, the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties), the infamous Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) branch has been allocated billions of dollars of funding and tens of thousands of new recruits.

ICE has subsequently used that budget to not only terrorize immigrant communities across the U.S., but to also attack protestors and others who speak out against the current administration and its positions on topics like Israel’s actions in Gaza. And in the years to follow, ICE and the DHS as a whole seem poised to become one of the largest agencies within the federal government, even as immigration to the U.S. is falling short. I expect that it’s because the Trump administration intends to make as much use of its private militia as possible, even at the expense of American citizens and our rights against authoritarian encroachments under the Constitution.

Finally, that brings us to the CIA. It’s an inherently secretive organization that originated as the Operation of Strategic Services in World War II, and whose lack of safeguards and control measures have led to a justifiable amount of criticism. It’s also led to a healthy amount of conspiracy theories, with everything from the Arab Spring to 9/11 being ascribed to the agency.

So when former House Rep. Tulsi Gabbard was appointed as the Director of National Intelligence, a position which oversees the CIA, some cheered it as a moment for reform. But as with the FBI and the DHS, you should be holding your applause.

Gabbard herself is a concerning figure, whose parroting of Russian propaganda and defense of infamous foreign Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad have demonstrated a lack of concern for the freedoms and liberties that America and the West at large are ostensibly meant to promote. This is not a path to acknowledging the CIA’s past wrongs, it’s a path towards normalizing the same wrongs being done by other nations at this very moment.

As for the agency itself, we likely won’t know the damages done for quite some time, but from what we have seen, the agency is poised to become yet another lethal direct arm of Trump. Its very public announcement of its intent to take action in Venezuela should sound an alarm for those who believe that Gabbard’s leadership would reverse the very trend.

More importantly, Gabbard’s rejection of egalitarianism is actively isolating us from our allies. In response to her confirmation, the other members of the Five Eyes (an intelligence collective made up of the U.S., U.K., Australia, New Zealand and Canada) have pledged to stop sharing intelligence with the U.S. That not only poses a greater risk to our national security, it also weakens our ability to counter nations like China, whose rapid militarization is a genuine threat to our security, despite what pacifism may have you believe. All of that to say, the CIA is not only going to now leave our nation weaker under Trump, we will likely see a return of the scores of CIA-backed coups that marked the early Cold War.

In the administration that will follow Trump, whether by election or other means, one can only hope that a wave of reforms will come fast and hard to prevent another authoritarian regime from ever taking rise. And within those reforms, we can hope that we will be given agencies that will not be used with malicious intent against both American citizens and the billions of citizens outside our nation.

So to those Americans who feel nothing but contempt for our three-letter orgs, I am asking you to look to the future, and not the hand of cards we have been dealt.