US facing dangerous intel crisis — and it’s getting worse: security expert

Trump Is Not “Managing” Intelligence. He Is Hollowing It Out.The Decision MakersThe source material is blunt about where power sits: Donald Trump is using personnel and statutory leverage to bend the intelligence system to his own political calendar. Senate Majority Leader John Thune can complain about being asked to “slow a nomination down,” but complaint is not control. Trump paused Jay Clayton’s nomination, kept Bill Pulte in place despite his lack of intelligence experience, and tied renewal of a critical surveillance authority to an unrelated voter-ID demand. That is not drift. It is deliberate institutional hardball.What the Story Actually SaysJane Harman’s warning is the useful part of the reporting because it names the damage without pretending it is accidental. Section 702 expired. The president tied its renewal to a separate political bargain. He then left the intelligence community under an acting director with no national security background, no hearing, no confirmation, and no real oversight. The article frames this as a crisis in the intelligence apparatus. More precisely, it is a crisis manufactured through executive manipulation and legislative submission.The Blame ShuffleThe cleanest misdirection in this story is the familiar one: weak institutions absorb blame for outcomes engineered by stronger actors. The article notes that Congress is “AWOL,” and that is true, but incomplete. Congress did not merely fail in a vacuum. It surrendered leverage, allowed a core intelligence tool to lapse, and tolerated a hostage-taking strategy from the White House. Once that happens, the failure stops looking like procedural confusion and starts looking like consent by inaction.Pulte as a SymptomBill Pulte is not the central problem; he is the tell. Installing a housing finance official with no national security background to run the intelligence community signals that experience is now subordinate to loyalty. That is how an administration converts a national security post into a political holding pen. The point is not competence. The point is control, delay, and the normalization of acting authority without accountability.The Real PatternThe larger pattern is institutional degradation through selective urgency. Trump treats intelligence infrastructure as bargaining material, Congress treats oversight as optional, and the result is a government that weakens its own defensive tools while cyber threats intensify. The Five Eyes warning about attacks that could hit power grids, air traffic, missile defense, or financial systems is not abstract backdrop. It is the case against this behavior. When the attack window is “measured in months,” as Harman puts it, political theater becomes a form of self-sabotage.Dismantling by RoutineThis is how democratic erosion often looks in practice: not tanks in the street, but deadlines missed, experts bypassed, nominations manipulated, and essential powers left to rot while officials posture about process. The harm is not confusion. It is governance turned into leverage and leverage turned into damage. Get full access to Systemic Error at paulstsmith.substack.com/subscribe