I am obliged to open with a disclaimer of sorts.

Faithful readers know of my visceral antipathy towards Donald Trump whose idea of governance is largely driven by vindictiveness and reprisal. So, the crux of this column should not be construed as an endorsement or hearty praise.

Still, there is one aspect of Trump’s blunt, arbitrary determination to wield a fiscal machete to the federal government that, in my view, makes, dare I say it, some sense and that other presidents and prime ministers ought, belatedly, to consider.

For much of my career as an investigative reporter, I trained a jaundiced eye on the unchecked powers and unlimited resources of so-called “intelligence” services that rarely, if ever, suffered any tangible repercussions of their disastrous litany of errors and egregious, law-violating excesses.

Often, those errors and excesses have had profound and lasting strategic and human consequences, yet the spies and the shrouded-in-unnecessary-secrecy institutions they work for have, invariably, been rewarded with more resources, rather than restrained or sanctioned.

Instead, for too long, both Republican and Democratic presidents have fuelled the security Leviathan without hesitation or pause.

For too long, intelligence agencies have operated as states within states, shielded from scrutiny by national security pretence and a complicit press. They lie with impunity. They leak selectively to tame reporters when it suits them. They destroy lives using the convenient cover of “top secret”.

For too long, oversight has been a punchline. Accountability is for whistleblowers, who are hunted, jailed or exiled.

In his own clumsy, erratic way, Trump is doing what Barack Obama and Joe Biden were too conditioned or culpable to do: he’s pumping........

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