Welcome back to my side-eye at Project 2025. This time: Chapter 7, Intelligence Community: pp 201-234 including endnotes. But before I dig into it, one quick personal note on why I’m doing this.
I’m doing this, and doing it right now, because we (meaning progressives) basically have until January 20, 2025 to formulate strategies for coping with the next 2-4 years under an administration which has declared war on the federal government as we know it.
Since Project 2025 is their policy statement, we need to know what it says.
Okay, here we go. “The United States Intelligence Community (IC) is a vast, intricate bureaucracy spread throughout 18 independent and Cabinet subagencies (p. 201).” P25’s thesis is that the IC struggles with mission creep, antiquated infrastructure, focus on “yesterday’s threats and methodologies … [and] over-correcting for past mistakes (p. 202).”
What follows is not a specific, office by office summary of the IC but vague complaints of redundancies and interagency conflicts within the IC network. P25 wants the incoming administration to restructure things so that all budgetary, strategy, analysis, and tactical decision-making funnels down to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), established after 9/11, with the sprawling watershed of intelligence agencies reorganized into something more like a canal. Or cloaca, your choice.
On page 204, P25 refers to “recruitment and retention failures, and a lack of will to remove underperforming” personnel. Then it returns to its deepest priority: “future IC leadership must address the widely promoted ‘woke’ culture that has spread throughout the federal government with identity politics and ‘social justice’ advocacy replacing such traditional American values as patriotism, colorblindness, and even workplace competence.”
You say ‘social justice’ like it’s a bad thing.
Project 2025 wants a government that is free to discriminate, especially against LGBTQ+ citizens. This is its core value.
And this is our biggest concern. We need to formulate and communicate very clear messaging about what it will mean for average citizens if the identity politics of the red tide – and they are explicitly pushing identity politics here, in which the identity is the straight white Christian who is “oppressed” when other types of people have equal rights – becomes law everywhere in the country.
Finally, we need to be loud about how this kind of Christian Nationalist, white supremacist dog-whistle has been in every single chapter of Project 2025 so far, even here where we’re talking about the intelligence community, whose job is literally to know things about the world.
The world is not all white and Christian. The empires have fallen. The nonwhite and the non-Christian are clawing back their nations from hundreds of years of brutal interference by the white and the Christian, and they are mostly a hostile, suspicious mess. Can we blame them?
The focus of the US intelligence community should not be the politics of its own employees, but how to address intelligence gathering in an efficient and effective manner that incorporates a true understanding of diversity.
Back to the document, which glances at a few more leaves on the IC tree, plus how to get around a rational reorganization of the IC by issuing executive orders. P25 wants a revision of Executive Order 12333 to address threats in cyberspace “while protecting the privacy and civil liberties of U.S. citizens (p. 205).”
Oh really? They want to protect privacy and civil liberties? Except a woman’s privacy in medical care, or the civil liberties of trans citizens, or the entire swath of privacy and free speech embodied in the pornography they want to ban.
The next recommendation is to use executive orders and budget finagling to hamstring agencies or personnel the incoming president doesn’t like. Then comes a suggestion to use “private-sector intelligence products and expertise (p. 206),” or in other words give more fat contracts to compliant billionaires.
On the CIA: “Public servants must be mindful that they are required to help the President implement [his] agenda while remaining apolitical …” but “leaders must commit to carrying out the President’s agenda … (p. 208).” Aren’t those two directives mutually exclusive? P25 then suggests a CIA hiring freeze except for additional appointees, reworking the personnel criteria, moving people around, decentralizing sub-offices, and be sure to “divert resources from any activities that promote unnecessary and distracting social engineering (p. 209).”
Next comes covert action, which P25 is in favor of, especially since if it’s managed through the IC it doesn’t have the limited “traditional military” focus of DOD intelligence (p. 210).
Covert action that’s outside of our defense network is meant to further the president’s foreign policy strategy. P25 suggests “streamlining or eliminating needless bureaucracy, particularly at State, to facilitate more expeditious decisions on tactical covert action (p. 211).” To me, that’s another Yay Dictatorship thing: taking action out of the hands of DOD or DOS and putting it directly in the hands of the president and his closest appointees.
The discussion reverts to a look at recruitment, retention, reassignment, separation, onboarding, clearance, etc. “[A]ccording to current CIA Director William Burns, it recently took more than 600 days, on average, for a CIA applicant to receive his or her necessary security clearance (p. 212).” Which seems like a legitimate concern.
But then we clutch our pearls about Hunter Biden’s laptop and the claims of Trump-Russia collusion following the 2016 election, and putting that kind of crap in here just makes the reasonable stuff seem accidental. Like they meant to write something rational and actionable, but they keep tripping over their agenda.
They want to crack down hard not only on leaks and whistleblowers, but on people who talk about any part of their IC work after leaving it (pp 213-216). After that, the focus turns to China and the need for more counterintelligence resources; an apparent swerve to tradecraft turns back to China and its influence (or not) on the 2020 election (p. 220).
It seems P25 thinks that China got Biden elected and also packed Congress at the 2022 midterms. Again, a somewhat rational discussion on analysis, information sharing, and defending networks is derailed by agenda. Especially since P25 moves on to complaining about the EU’s data privacy standards and hinting that we maybe shouldn’t share intelligence with this longtime ally (p. 226).
My real problem with this chapter – aside from the anti-diversity agenda running through it – is I want it wonkier. If they’d given a flow chart showing all the IC offices, etc., and broken out the clear redundancies or duplications, laid out the total staffing and the budgets, then offered some concrete reorganizational strategy, I’d be more inclined to view this as a sincere attempt to improve the situation they claim is so bad.