Donald Trump's war against the "deep state" and his political opponents appears to be on a collision course with U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Those familiar with Trump's plans say that after his incoming administration takes power next month, these agencies could be used to further Trump's personal interests abroad and to create an unprecedented domestic surveillance apparatus wielded for political ends.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 offers a glimpse into the playbook for Trump’s second term and the changes to the U.S. intelligence apparatus that the new administration hopes to make.
Much of the document envisions a right-wing "whole of government" approach to positioning the U.S. against what it calls “the generational threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party.” Dustin Carmack, author of the "Intelligence Community" section of Project 2025, also writes of the importance of allowing “dissenting views” on topics like Beijing’s alleged intent to influence the 2020 and 2022 elections and the "origin of COVID-19," two topics of particular importance to MAGA loyalists.
According to Carmack and the Heritage Foundation, the job of ensuring that “dissenting viewpoints” like these make their way to the president belongs the director of national intelligence. Carmack himself served in the DNI’s office in the first Trump administration under then-director John Ratcliffe.
In Carmack's vision, the incoming DNI will be responsible for controlling members of the intelligence community who, the document argues, made “backchannel attempts to change or suppress analytic views," such as alternative theories on the origin of COVID-19 or about the 2020 election. Carmack also recommends that the DNI should be primarily responsible for the President’s Daily Brief, a duty traditionally vested in the CIA.
Michael Hayden, a former CIA director who has also held senior positions in the DNI's office, predicts a power struggle between the office of the DNI and the CIA over who gets information in front of the president. Hayden also said that he’s concerned about a potential disconnection between what the CIA actually does and what the DNI tells the president.
So far, Trump has nominated former congresswoman turned Fox News host Tulsi Gabbard for the DNI position, which would theoretically give her primary responsibility for the intelligence and analysis that makes it to Trump’s desk. Ratcliffe, the former DNI, has been nominated as director of the CIA and would be subordinate to Gabbard, according to this plan.
What those two have in common, despite having served in Congress as members of different parties, is their loyalty to the president-elect. Gabbard was a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate before leaving the party in 2022. She becaming a Republican two years later after endorsing Trump and has built a MAGA following based on her criticism of Democrats and her appearances with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now Trump's nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
Ratcliffe’s political identity is similarly linked to Trump. He was first elected to Congress from a deep-red Texas district in 2014, but dramatically raised his profile in the GOP by attacking special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election and by serving on Trump’s advisory team during his first impeachment hearings.
Ratcliffe was named to the DNI position in 2020 to replace acting director Richard Grenell, who was seen as both profoundly unqualified and a loyal Trump henchman. According to Larry Pfeiffer, who was chief of staff to former CIA director Michael Hayden and now directs the Hayden Center at George Mason University, Ratcliffe was confirmed by Congress because “it meant getting Grenell out of the job.”
Pfeiffer observed that the U.S. intelligence community "is outrageously powerful and incredibly secret, and it's natural for people to be suspicious of that.” Given that environment, he added, it's crucial that intelligence agencies act in an "apolitical" and "antiseptic" way. Pfeiffer said he hoped Trump's picks would "be parking their politics at the door," but that he had concerns on that front.
Pfeiffer agreed with the general assessment that Trump is seeking loyalty as the main qualification for jobs in the new administration, and said these picks signal an injection of political concerns into the work of the intelligence community. He cited Gabbard as an example, noting that she has little or no national security experience or managerial experience but is perceived as a Trump loyalist.
“She’s been very, very political, and I'm not sure she's prepared to not be political,” Pfeiffer said.
For his part, Hayden, who was CIA director from 2006 to 2009, said that he was concerned that a political loyalist such as Gabbard might skew the intelligence that makes it to the president: For instance, by downplaying negative intelligence collected about Russia and emphasizing intelligence collected on Ukraine. He also wondered whether Gabbard or other intelligence officials might not be willing to offer Trump information that he didn't want to hear.
“I talked to the president many times," said Hayden, referring to George W. Bush, under whom he served. "He was a good man. Sometimes we agreed and sometimes we disagreed. Trump is not a good man."
It's ultimately up to the president what to do with the intelligence he receives, Hayden noted, adding his concerns that Trump could wield intelligence in his personal interests rather than the national interest.
Both Hayden and Pfeiffer said they were alarmed by Trump's potential nomination of Kash Patel as FBI director. (Trump will first have to fire current director Christopher Wray, who nominally holds a 10-year term that runs into 2027.) Pfeiffer said of Patel, "He’s so far shown that his greatest attribute is to do anything and everything that Donald Trump wants him to do. ... He’s jumping before he’s asked to jump."
Pfeiffer speculated that Trump is "on a revenge tour" with respect to the intelligence community, noting that one of Trump's "early experiences" as president came when then-FBI director James Comey "put the Steele dossier in front of him" — and was fired not long afterward.
Trump’s prioritization of loyalty could change the character of the intelligence community and the FBI rapidly, according to both Hayden and Pfeiffer. Most members of the U.S. intelligence apparatus and all agents and employees of the FBI are part of the “excepted service,” meaning they do not enjoy many of the civil service protections afforded in other administrative agencies.
Pfeiffer explained that employees of the FBI and CIA are in the excepted service because of concerns about espionage, criminal activity and malfeasance. That effectively means "they can be fired at will." In most cases, such dismissals would go through an agency-specific review process, but Trump or his appointees will have the latitude to fire anyone they see as disloyal with little pushback.
Pfeiffer said the main thing standing in Trump’s way, if he chooses to install loyalists in agencies like the CIA, will be the realistic timeline he faces: "To dramatically bend those institutions to the will of the president, you have to replace three or four layers deep in those organizations, and that’s going to take time. It’s hard to turn an aircraft carrier 90 degrees in the middle of the ocean."
Patrick Eddington, a former CIA analyst who is now a national security and civil liberties fellow at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute, said he shared Hayden and Pfeiffer’s concerns about the FBI but identified a different set of key players in the incoming administration: the leaders of the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Legal Counsel. Those positions, he said, could be leveraged to institute sweeping changes much faster at the FBI than at other agencies, and with little or no input from Congress.
"People who are talking about individual nominations and Cabinet departments are chasing the shiny object," Eddington said, "rather than focusing on where the nexus of power is."
Trump’s nominee to lead OMB, Russell Vought, also held that post in the first Trump administration and will have the power, in Eddington's assessment, to “wave a hand” and inflict “radical” change on the federal bureaucracy.
Eddington added that Vought and Patel will have the freedom to make substantial changes to the FBI, which has no legislative charter, meaning that major alterations to the way it operates do not require congressional approval. Vought could essentially have the FBI “zeroed out of existence, from a legislative standpoint,” Eddington said, with little or no opportunity for Congress to stop that.
While Eddington doesn’t expect Vought and Patel to go that far, he said he expects them to reach deep into the FBI’s bureaucracy and replace staff at the Senior Executive Service level and below. Such employees are not subject to Senate confirmation and have traditionally carried on their work from one presidential administration to another, regardless of partisan politics.
"Those folks tend to be the buffer between the actual political appointees and the actual career civil service people," Eddington said, adding that Trump allies "could go very deep," replacing FBI employees down to the unit chief and field office level. While such employees might be able to seek legal recourse against such dismissals, that process would take years to play out, while the bureau is fundamentally transformed from the inside out with little to no resistance.
While such a sweeping and revolutionary takeover of the FBI like would be unprecedented, wielding the federal government’s law enforcement agencies to political ends definitely would not be.
During World War I, for example, the Bureau of Investigation, which would later become the FBI, created the American Protective League, a network of somewhere between 250,000 and 300,000 secret informants the intended to enforce patriotism and stifle dissent. The league specifically targeted suspected German sympathizers, socialists, labor activists and pacifists. Informants sometimes broke up labor movement meetings and tracked people accused, for instance, of checking out German-language books from the library.
Other domestic surveillance schemes under earlier presidents have varied in scope and been pursued for various reasons. Under Franklin D. Roosevelt, for example, journalist John Franklin Carter ran a significant unofficial domestic intelligence operation that collected information on the president’s political opponents and assessed the loyalties of Japanese immigrants and their American-born descendants.
Eddington said that Trump loyalists at the FBI could use the bureau as a vehicle for Trump’s political ends and could also contract with private investigative entities to conduct investigations and surveillance outside the auspices of the federal government.
Such private contractors could use the enormous troves of commercially available online data, including everything from geolocation to online purchase history, to build files on Trump’s political opponents or perceived dissidents.
"When you combine that with license plate readers and all the other data available at the federal, state and local level," Eddington said, "all of that could be put into dossiers on Trump’s political opponents. They could put together very detailed information just using commercial and social media data. They’d never have to go before a judge."
That information could then be used to seek further surveillance permission from a judge, arguing that the pattern of tracked behavior indicates a possible violation of federal law.
The Office of Legal Counsel, Eddington added, could then issue opinions giving Trump’s remade FBI cover for its surveillance operations. In the past, such opinions have created legal carve-outs for what would otherwise be regarded as criminal activity. For instance, under George W. Bush the office declared that waterboarding was not torture under the legal definition of that word, which shut down any possible prosecution of CIA or military intelligence operators who had ordered or conducted waterboarding of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Eddington noted that the Trump administration will also have the tools to prevent information about changes made to the FBI from becoming public. He said it was possible to abuse a loophole in Section 552C of the Freedom of Information Act, which has been used by agencies to “lie to requesters about the existence” of certain records.
In practical terms, this means that the public rely on congressional Republicans and potential whistleblowers from within the Trump administration for transparency. In practical terms, that means it could be years, or even decades, before Trump-era changes to the FBI become public knowledge.
"If you get the right people in those positions the sky can practically be the limit for Trump," Eddington said. "In terms of folks who are looking to obstruct or oppose Trump’s agenda, my comment is, 'Good luck.'"
