Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has killed the most recent, already drafted, edition of the intelligence community’s future-oriented Global Trends reports in addition to laying off the staff that produces the reports. The Global Trends series, which began in 1997, has produced a new report every four or five years. Each report looks forward fifteen to twenty years to highlight possible developments in the international system that future policymakers may need to address. Previous editions in the series have presciently identified possibilities like global pandemics and increased international migration. 

Gabbard announced the cancellation of Global Trends with the kind of caustic, accusatory language that has come to characterize the administration’s reactions to any information emerging from the bureaucracy that it dislikes and distrusts. Gabbard asserts that “elements of the Intelligence Community’s deep state” used the staff that produces the reports “to push a partisan political agenda.” 

As for the new report that was scheduled to be published this year, according to Gabbard, it “violate[d] professional analytic tradecraft standards in an effort to propagate a political agenda that ran counter to all of the current President’s national security priorities.”

Such accusations sound nonsensical to anyone familiar with the substance of previous Global Trends reports (which, at least for now, can still be read online) and how they are produced. There is probably no other output of the intelligence community—apart from products that address narrow technical questions, such as the range of a foreign artillery piece—that is more detached from the here-and-now debate over current policies. The format of looking well into the future provides most of that detachment.

Moreover, even the discussions of the future are far removed from advancing specific policies. At least as much as with any other intelligence community work, the discussions focus on identifying potential problems rather than proposing solutions. The approach is, “Here are some directions that international society, politics, and the economy might take in the future, in ways that probably will present issues or challenges for national governments.”

Far from being hatched by some deep-state cabal, the Global Trends reports reflect extensive........

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