What Just Happened? Dismantling the Intelligence Community’s Foreign Malign Influence Center
One would think the Trump administration would have an interest in preserving government functions that monitor nefarious foreign government activity targeting the president of the United States. Instead, in her Aug. 20 announcement of the broader ODNI reorganization and the dismantlement of FMIC, with its remaining work spread across other units, Gabbard claimed the office had politicized intelligence (a charge she also leveled at the intelligence community when the administration recently declassified materials purporting to support its claim that Russia did not interfere on behalf of Trump’s 2016 campaign). To the contrary — not only did the FMIC avoid putting its thumb on the scales of the election results, but it also avoided doing anything that could be misconstrued as censorship of free speech. The FMIC did not recommend censoring specific sources of information, nor did it tell citizens what to read or what to believe. There was no deep-state plot to deplatform conservative voices or denigrate the Trump campaign.
While the law passed by Congress in 2019 to authorize the FMIC stipulates that the center cannot be formally closed until 2028, ODNI’s decision to cripple it now means the United States has effectively ended any meaningful government role in addressing the foreign interference threat. In the meantime, China, Iran, Russia, and other nation-States will continue to use information operations, cyber operations, and other hybrid threat vectors to destabilize the U.S. government, subvert American society, and damage U.S. national security. For example, Russia is ramping up efforts this year to inject Russian State propaganda into the data sets informing AI chat bots, a tactic certain to be copied by other adversarial governments. In July, Microsoft unmasked a cyber operation by the Russian State Security Service (FSB) to target foreign embassies in Moscow with malware.
As congressional oversight rapidly atrophies, members of Congress likely will not rally to the defense of FMIC on a bipartisan basis. But that does not preclude members from using their oversight power to ensure the FMIC’s functions endure in other capacities. Only a year ago, Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee, in an open hearing, not only voiced their shared belief that hostile governments were waging campaigns to undermine Americans’ confidence in elections and democracy, but also seemingly agreed that the U.S. government should play an important role in defending against these threats.
Members can still demand the Trump administration specify which U.S. agencies will monitor the various State-sponsored threats that target national interests and, in the absence of ODNI coordination, which part of the U.S. government will coordinate analysis of this multifaceted threat ecosystem so policymakers can use the information responsibly. Relevant committees, including on intelligence and foreign relations, should call hearings that compel administration officials to delineate which countries are conducting hybrid operations to threaten U.S. interests at home and overseas and what specific steps the administration is taking to counter them.
The administration should not get a free pass to tear down the bureaucratic architecture – established, ironically, during Trump’s first administration — to protect U.S. national security and democracy from a metastasizing ecosystem of foreign interference threats. If it does, the beneficiaries reside in Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran.
David Salvo is a senior fellow and managing director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD) at the German Marshall Fund (GMF).The article,originally appearing in Just Security,was posted to the website of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, is published here courtesy of the GMFUS.The views expressed in GMF publications and commentary are the views of the author alone.
