COMPROMISING INTELLIGENCE Amateur Hour: The Unserious Appointment of Bill Pulte
Pulte’s nomination is not an aberration but part of an established pattern. Trump’s national-security personnel choices routinely pass over the obvious pool of experienced professionals in favor of loyalists whose core qualification is ideological and personal devotion.
In a column last year arguing that Pete Hegseth was unfit to be defense secretary, George F. Will proposed a simple thought experiment. Suppose, he wrote, you gathered 100 intelligent, public-spirited people with experience running large organizations, dealing with allies, and understanding modern threats, and asked each of them to list 100 plausible candidates to lead the Pentagon. You might end up with as many as 10,000 names. The probability that any of those lists would include Hegseth, Will concluded, was essentially zero.
Apply the same thought experiment, but now to the job of Director of National Intelligence. Ask 100 seasoned national-security professionals—people who have lived with the daily grind of inter-agency coordination, covert operations, and signals intelligence—to give you 10,000 names apiece, this time of individuals they would trust to sit atop the U.S. intelligence community. Out of that theoretical pool of one million candidates, the probability that anyone would propose Bill Pulte—a housing regulator with no national-security experience and a record of treating confidential data as a political weapon—is also approximately zero.
Pulte’s current job is to oversee Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, not to assess Iranian enrichment rates or Chinese signaling on Taiwan. His public portfolio has been mortgage finance and housing policy, not clandestine networks, covert action, or cyber intrusions. Yet even in that more prosaic role, he distinguished himself not by technocratic competence but by his eagerness to weaponize his perch on behalf of Donald Trump’s political and personal grievances. Members of Congress and press investigations have accused him of rummaging through mortgage databases for dirt on Trump’s enemies, and of presiding over the improper sharing of confidential Fannie Mae pricing data with Freddie Mac, moves that triggered internal alarm and the ouster of officials who objected.
There is no need to dwell on every detail of those episodes; other writers already have. The essential point is simpler and more disturbing. This is not a man who treats sensitive information as a public trust. It is someone who has already shown a willingness to see state-held data as raw material for partisan combat.
