Bill Pulte and the Too Deep State

The position of Director of National Intelligence came into being after the terrorist attack in New York City revealed that separate intelligence agencies were hiding the results of their work from each other and needed someone to bring everything together in one place. But the anti-bureaucrats ignore this:

  

“President Trump's decision to make housing regulator Bill Pulte the acting director of national intelligence is being widely panned, but perhaps Mr. Trump has an ironic sense of humor: He is showing everyone how useless the DNI and its bureaucracy are for national security.

 

Mr. Pulte, a housing scion, at least had some qualifications to regulate the government housing giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He has no experience with intelligence or national security.

 

His main appeal to Mr. Trump is that he supports the President's Iran policy and is known for his personal loyalty to Mr. Trump. That's better than Tulsi Gabbard, the recent DNI who resigned in May to attend to her ailing husband. But it was no secret in Washington that Ms. Gabbard, a long-time isolationist, had lost influence in the White House.

 

Mr. Pulte's main accomplishment at the Federal Housing Finance Agency was making it easier for Fannie and Freddie to guarantee more mortgages for riskier borrowers. He's also the man who dug up the mortgage documents of Mr. Trump's political opponents and referred them to the Justice Department for fraud.

 

This is the main reason Jerome Powell is staying on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors even after his term as chair ended. This also may backfire on the President if the Supreme Court rules in favor of Lisa Cook, the Fed Governor whom Mr. Trump has sought to fire because of the unproven fraud charge kicked up by Mr. Pulte. As DNI, Mr. Pulte isn't likely to be any less political.

 

Mr. Pulte's appointment underscores that the DNI should never have been created. Congress established the position after 9/11 to coordinate intelligence from the FBI and the 16 or so other U.S. intelligence agencies. We argued at the time that it would become another layer of bureaucracy that would tend toward political "consensus" judgments that might harm national security, and so it has.

 

Its first director, John Negroponte, quickly hired hundreds of people who duplicated the job of the analytical side of the CIA. It's now a vast political bureaucracy. James Clapper, Barack Obama's DNI, was a political partisan credibly accused of misleading Congress about the data the government collected on American citizens. He also contributed to the false Russia-Trump collusion narrative in the 2016 election and 2017 that did so much damage to public trust in government.

 

The intelligence state is large enough without the DNI. The CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the rest can do the job.

 

In a better world, Congress would use Mr. Pulte's appointment to eliminate the DNI and send its staff back to other agencies. DOGE could have made a valuable contribution if it had looked at the intel world and recommended such a streamlining.

 

But as readers may have noticed, we don't live in that world.

 

This means CIA director John Ratcliffe and others will have to give Mr. Pulte a crash course in intelligence analysis, how to make sense of competing evidence, and the implications for national security and American foreign policy.

 

 Mr. Trump wanted revenge on the deep state, and here it is.” [1]

 

1. Bill Pulte and the Too Deep State. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 04 June 2026: A14.