The Senate Intelligence Committee will have a public meeting to discuss threats facing the United States, and our intelligence leaders owe Americans answers about these threats.
The Senate Intelligence Committee by necessity conducts its work mostly behind closed doors in order to protect our nation’s secrets, but this morning, we will convene for a rare public hearing to question our nation’s top intelligence officials about the threats facing the United States from around the world. This annual hearing has traditionally been a bipartisan priority because it forces our nation’s intelligence leaders to be forthcoming and transparent not only with Congress but with the American people about the myriad of national security challenges our intelligence community grapples with each day.
As Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine continues, Iran continues to support terrorists and inch closer to a nuclear weapon, and China continues to conduct espionage and cyberhacking campaigns in pursuit of political and economic domination – not to mention ongoing threats to the homeland from aspiring extremists and drug cartels – this year’s threat assessment promises to be one of the most complicated and concerning yet.
So it boggles the mind that the current administration would use this moment to undertake so many actions that severely damage our ability to combat these threats. As our nation’s intelligence leaders prepare to testify before our Committee, there are some tough questions they must answer about Americans’ safety and security.
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How does ending foreign assistance make us safer? This is foreign assistance that paid for the units in Ukraine that provide air defense to civilians being attacked daily by Russia. It paid for the units guarding camps in Syria where we detain ISIS fighters. It paid for programs abroad that ensure diseases like Ebola don’t make their way to our shores. And until recently, it paid for the construction of a railway in Africa that would have helped give the United States access to much-needed critical minerals in the Democratic Republic of the Congo – a project that is now looking for Chinese financing.
How does firing our most experienced FBI agents make us safer? One of President Trump’s first actions in office was to fire the top agents in charge of criminal investigations, intelligence, and counterterrorism – the last of whose penultimate actions in office were to disrupt ISIS attacks planned in the United States, and bring to justice the key planner of the Abbey Gate attack in Afghanistan that killed 13 U.S. servicemembers – an effort the president himself touted in his address to Congress.
How is America made more secure by: firing the staff responsible for overseeing the safety and security of our country’s nuclear stockpile; the ones responsible for responding to cyberattacks like Salt Typhoon; the ones responsible for preventing disease from reaching our shores; and the hundreds of officers across the intelligence community, who have received specialized training and been subjected to extensive security vetting, at considerable expense to the taxpayer, so that they may carry out our nation’s most sensitive work, often in spite of great personal danger (as the 140 stars carved into the CIA’s Memorial Wall attest)? Can anyone tell me how firing probationary officers – without cause, and apparently without regard for merit, accomplishment, expense already incurred by the taxpayer in vetting and training, or the difficulty posed in filling the intelligence gaps left behind – makes us safer, or is an efficient use of taxpayer dollars?
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The instability of the last two months also undermines a critical component of our intelligence-gathering capabilities: the trust of allies. The intelligence we gather to keep America safe frequently depends on friends who tip us off or have access to sources we lack. Whether it is bellicose threats to annex Greenland, demonstrated ineptitude in protecting undercover personnel exposed over unclassified email, or discussing war plans over group chat, our credibility is already severely endangered. How can our allies trust us when we – without consultation or notice – stop sharing intelligence or providing support to Ukraine, at war for its survival against Russia’s onslaught?
For that matter, how can our allies trust not only our government, but U.S. businesses when they themselves can be subject to such arbitrary political decisions, as commercial space company Maxar was when it was directed to stop providing satellite imagery to Ukraine? How can we hope to defeat China’s ambitions of technological dominance if other countries determine that Americans simply cannot be relied upon? The mistrust will have profound consequences not just for our national security, but for our economic security.
Our nation’s intelligence leaders owe the American people nothing less than full and transparent answers about how they plan to deal with the fallout, for the damage of these actions will not be reversed overnight and will inevitably, I fear, make Americans less safe.
