COMPROMISING INTELLIGENCE The Acting DNI and the Intelligence Office Trump Wants
Bill Pulte’s appointment as Acting Director of National Intelligence suggests that ODNI may now be serving a more political function than advising the president.
On Monday, President Donald Trump named Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, as acting director of national intelligence (DNI). Pulte has no known background in intelligence, counterterrorism, diplomacy, military affairs, or national security policy. His professional experience, apart from his current administration post, is rooted in real estate, private equity, and philanthropy.
In a conventional administration, that résumé would raise obvious questions about his ability to oversee the nation’s intelligence enterprise. But Pulte’s lack of national security experience may also signal the role the president expects the acting DNI to play in the coming months.
The DNI was created in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks to establish coherence for a community whose budgets, cultures, authorities, and operational centers remained dispersed across the government. Congress assigned the director sweeping responsibilities: head of the Intelligence Community, overseer of the National Intelligence Program, and “principal adviser to the President … for intelligence matters related to the national security.”
Yet the office never fully escaped the condition it was designed to overcome. From the beginning, the DNI’s influence depended less on statutory language than on presidential confidence and preference. CIA directors retained operational authority, institutional weight, and, often, closer access to presidents. Over time, the DNI role settled into something more practical — albeit still critical — than the original reform ambition: coordinator of judgments, manager of process, broker among agencies, and guardian of community-wide integration.
That unresolved tension continued through the first Trump administration. What may be new with the current administration since I last addressed this issue in June 2025 for Just Security is the direction in which Trump has taken it. The DNI may no longer be competing for primacy as the president’s intelligence adviser, but instead becoming more of an instrument for political validation, public defense, and institutional cover.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe appears to have emerged as the president’s principal intelligence adviser in practice. In contrast, Tulsi Gabbard’s influence as DNI over major national-security decisions waned considerably, with the office’s remaining value increasingly appearing to lie in managing the public perimeter of those decisions and lending the DNI’s institutional prestige to politically-charged actions.
