Last week, when President Donald Trump was about to nominate Bill Pulte, the head of his housing-finance authority, to be director of national intelligence, some Republican senators proposed abolishing the DNI office rather than vote down such a clearly unqualified candidate and thereby arouse Trump’s vindictiveness.

Many were relieved when Trump withdrew Pulte’s name and instead nominated Jay Clayton, a former SEC commissioner who is now the U.S. prosecutor for the Southern District of New York. Clayton may be in some respects a more serious choice, but the law creating the office back in 2004 required that the director have “extensive national security expertise”—something Clayton lacks as well. And so, some still mull just scuttling the agency.

Is this a good idea? The office was created in the wake of the 9/11 attack, when a commission concluded that the terrorists succeeded in part because U.S. intelligence agencies weren’t communicating with one another and thus couldn’t “connect the dots” that would have allowed them to see a complete picture of al-Qaida’s plot. The DNI’s office, or ODNI, would coordinate the agencies—all 18 of them—to avoid similar mistakes in the future.

How’s that worked out the past 22 years? Has the office served its purpose, or has it lingered one bureaucracy layered on top of a bunch of other bureaucracies, as some critics foresaw? What would happen if ODNI were abolished and the CIA once again become, as its initials indicate, the Central Intelligence Agency?

I have followed the agency and talked with some of its directors and analysts ever since it was created. In the past week, I’ve interviewed (on a background basis) some of its former senior officials from Democratic and Republican administrations, as well as some close observers. And I’ve concluded that, while far from perfect, ODNI has performed its tasks well and that abolishing it would be a serious mistake.

First, without the DNI, the intel agencies would once again be unable to “connect the dots”—which, as one former senior official told me, “is even more important now than it was on 9/11,” given the added complexities brought on by globalization since then. The CIA can’t do it; in fact, the CIA never wanted to share its intel. Nor would anyone have the authority to demand that, for instance, the FBI share information with the Department of Homeland Security.

Second, the agencies on their own tend to collect intelligence that addresses their own needs. Nine of these agencies are within the Defense Department, so they focus mainly on the tactical needs of warfighters, not on broad national interests.

Third, to the extent intel agencies do focus on similar issues, they........

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