Tulsi Gabbard can do one great service to the country as director of national intelligence: help abolish her agency.

Gabbard’s job is to oversee the 18 sometimes fractious intelligence units that in theory report to her. Because she had no experience in intelligence before taking the job, expectations were low. But she has managed to underperform them. Her most visible role has been as a political commissar, campaigning for President Donald Trump’s agenda of retribution and for his personal attention.

Tulsi Gabbard can do one great service to the country as director of national intelligence: help abolish her agency.

Gabbard’s job is to oversee the 18 sometimes fractious intelligence units that in theory report to her. Because she had no experience in intelligence before taking the job, expectations were low. But she has managed to underperform them. Her most visible role has been as a political commissar, campaigning for President Donald Trump’s agenda of retribution and for his personal attention.

Gabbard’s poor performance has exposed a deeper flaw. The ODNI, as her office is called, has been an accident waiting to happen since it was created in 2004 as a response to the 9/11 disaster. It’s an awkward fit, between politics and professionalism. It has worked best when run by experienced intelligence managers like Michael Hayden or James Clapper. Even then, it risked being a “bureaucratic fifth wheel” in the intelligence community, as the conservative manifesto Project 2025 put it.

Too often, the ODNI has duplicated and second-guessed what other agencies were doing. At a time when the intelligence community needs to become smaller and nimbler, the DNI structure added more duplicative bureaucracy. As Jon Rosenwasser, the agency’s former chief financial officer, said in a CIA journal in 2021: “The ODNI had sprawling functions and authorities but wound up with a workforce only partially equipped to fulfill them.”

Gabbard has made these structural problems vastly worse. Her signature accomplishment has been creating what she calls the “Director’s Initiatives Group” to frame innovative policy. That sounds like a good idea. But when you look on the ODNI website for its achievements, they’re all backward-looking efforts to settle political scores for Trump.

The five listed “initiatives” include two attacks on the intelligence community’s review of Russian election interference in 2016, a tirade........

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