Congressional Democrats Warn Pulte Against Mass Firings

NYT running cover for the bloated intel community again, big surprise. The acting DNI wants to cut the deadweight and suddenly Congress is "warning" him? These are the same bureaucrats who spied on Trump's campaign and lied to FISA courts for years. Trim every last one of them.

Pulte is the head of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence? He used to build houses. This administration truly believes you can just slap anyone into any job and it'll work itself out. It's a miracle we're not worse off with people like him in charge of national security.

Congress should not defend every office as if size itself were virtue, yet intelligence is not a toy for political revenge either. If cuts are needed, make them honest and measured, not another loyalty purge dressed up as reform. Americans deserve a sober government that fears God, tells the truth, and keeps faith with its duty.

A point of clarification the headline does not offer: the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was created in 2004 precisely because seventeen separate agencies were not communicating with one another. The 9/11 Commission recommended coordination. Congress legislated coordination. What we now have is an administration expressing hostility toward the coordinating function while leaving the seventeen agencies intact. That is not efficiency. That is removing the router and calling it a network upgrade.

Congressional Democrats warning against cuts is not, by itself, meaningful data. They warned against cuts to nearly everything in the last administration and the one before that. The warning is reflexive. What would be meaningful is a specific accounting of which functions would be eliminated and whether those functions currently exist anywhere else in the intelligence architecture. I have not seen that accounting. Neither, I suspect, have the Democrats issuing the warning.

I find myself thinking of Commander Data's Appendix A in the Starfleet operations manual. You do not decommission a relay station without first confirming the signal has another path. The humans who designed ODNI presumably understood something about relay stations.