A National Security Team of Failing Failures

The Trump White House is down to the F list of hires.

Photo by Martin Sanchez on Unsplash

Back in January of 2025 the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World expressed… let’s say “healthy skepticism” about the caliber of Trump administration cabinet nominees — particularly in foreign policy and national security:

Even thinking about whether Hegseth can white-knuckle his way through being Secretary of Defense without regular three-gin-and-tonic-breakfasts is unsettling. The transition team’s efforts to purge civil servants believed to be disloyal to president Trump personally exacerbates the problem. In other words, Hegseth isn’t the only one who is going to be white-knuckling it for the next few years — so is anyone whose job it is to pay attention to U.S. foreign policy and national security.

In the first term the hard-working staff over at Spoiler Alerts wrote at length about the beclowning of the executive branch. By the end of Trump’s first term, he was relying on D-list policy principals, scraping the bottom of the bottom of the barrel.

The D-list is the starting point for most of Trump’s second-term cabinet. Sure, there are a few nominees who would have served in any GOP administration of the last fifty years. Most of these clowns, however, would have been laughed out of the room in any prior administration.

Eighteen months into Trump’s second term, it’s becoming clear that the caliber of the administration’s foreign policy and national security team is devolving even further.

Consider, for example, the current state of the lawyers who have to staff all these agencies and advise them on, you know, what’s legal and what is illegal. According to the New York Times’ Eileen Sullivan and Andrea Fuller, the Trump administration is losing an awful lot of legal talent: “President Trump’s upheaval of the federal government has led to an exodus of more than 10,000 lawyers since the beginning of 2025, a striking loss of legal talent that has left some agencies pushing to find attorneys to carry out his agenda. Roughly one in five lawyers who worked in the government at the end of 2024 had left by March of this year.” This includes a 26% drop in Department of Energy, a 21% drop in the Department of Justice (with the greatest absolute decline in the number of lawyers), and a 15% decline in Department of Defense legal staff.¹

The remaining lawyers are not exactly earning the trust of the judicial branch, as the NYT’s Mattathias Schwartz writes:

An increasing number of judges appear to be questioning the longtime assumption that Justice Department lawyers can be taken at their word, part of the “presumption of regularity” that experts say allows federal courts to operate swiftly and smoothly….

Judges have over the past year called out the administration for making dodgy legal arguments, filing dishonest testimony and failing to comply with court orders. Some of the earlier problems stem from the fact that Justice Department lawyers often represent other government agencies in court, including the Homeland Security Department, which has proved to be a difficult client, particularly in immigration cases.

But judges have taken a distinctly harsher tone in recent weeks, assigning responsibility directly to individual Justice Department lawyers for their own representations in court….

During prior administrations, a job as an assistant U.S. attorney was a coveted status marker for lawyers. Under the Trump administration, the department has borrowed lawyers from the Homeland Security Department and the military, posted job solicitations online and offered starting bonuses. Not only are applications down, but those who are applying are also generally less qualified, officials have said.

Then there’s the intelligence community. According to Reuters’ Erin Banco and Jonathan Landay, the CIA and Office of the Director of National Intelligence have apparently stopped cooperating in sharing intelligence and analysis. This seems like a big deal:

The CIA has stopped contributing to some intelligence assessments, including those related to the Iran war, produced by the office of the nation’s top spy as disputes over intelligence-sharing and areas of responsibility boil over, say people familiar with the matter.

The infighting between the CIA and ​the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has flared for more than a year, disrupting collaboration on national security analyses on which presidents long have relied to navigate complex foreign challenges, said a U.S. official and three people ‌with direct knowledge of the matter….

The CIA’s move to significantly pare back its contributions to assessments produced by Gabbard’s office is one ‌of the most ⁠serious consequences of the agencies’ mutual distrust.

The CIA has been one of the main contributors to the reports produced by the National Intelligence Council (NIC), the premier U.S. intelligence analytical body. The reports carry weight, especially during a war.

Two of the sources with direct knowledge of the matter said that assessments about Iran — where the U.S. military has been fighting since February — are among those the agency no longer regularly participates in.

The CIA and ODNI now operate largely as two separate analytical operations, the sources said.

At one point last year, the CIA, in response to friction between the two agencies, stopped publishing NIC reports on the internal intelligence community distribution service it controls, briefly limiting the accessibility of the analytical products, the sources said.

How to put this… the ODNI trying to put together any decent intelligence product without the contribution of the CIA would be like, oh, I don’t know, an NFL team deciding to run an offensive play without any offensive linemen. It ends badly.

Gabbard’s departure at the end of this month as DNI might provide a moment when the two intelligence agencies could mend the damage- HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!! I’m sorry, I couldn’t keep that in, because the White House has announced his interim replacement, and it is one of Trump’s dumber, scarier choices: “President Donald Trump named Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence on Tuesday, a surprise move that would elevate a political ally with no known background in intelligence to a key national spy post.”

Pulte’s primary claim to fame during Trump 2.0 has been to advocate that the DOJ prosecute Federal Reserve board member Lisa Cook and New York Attorney General Letitia James over dubious claims of mortgage fraud that, so far, have not remotely panned out. This is the dipshit that Trump wants to put in charge of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Politico’s Daniela Cheslow reports that the Pulte announcement has not gone down well in the intelligence community:

“It will cause worry amongst IC professionals that the DNI will be fully weaponized in support of going after Trump’s political enemies, given Pulte’s track record,” said Marc Polymeropoulos, a retired 26-year veteran of the CIA….

Brian O’Neill, a former CIA senior executive, said the practical impact of Pulte’s appointment may be limited, especially as CIA Director John Ratcliffe appears to be the president’s senior intelligence adviser.

Still, O’Neill said, “it is reasonable to worry that ODNI will continue its shift from an intelligence management organization toward a political instrument.” Pulte’s thin national security resume, he added, only deepened his concern.

Here is the tell about the decline in the quality of Trump’s second-term team: in most of these reports, Ratcliffe comes across as the sober, reasonable one. During Trump’s first term, however, Trump had to withdraw Ratcliffe’s nomination to be the Director of National Intelligence in 2019 due to skepticism in the intelligence community and the U.S. Senate about his qualifications. He eventually squeaked through a year later, but a brief glance at his Wikipedia entry shows that he was accused of using his position at ODNI to declassify documents that attempted to impugn Hillary Clinton.

This guy is now seen as the sober statesman of Trump’s intelligence community. Like Marco Rubio, he now only looks good by comparison — surrounded by the least competent clowns in America.

1. The only department to increase its number of lawyers is the Department of Homeland Security.