After Good Faith: Intelligence Oversight in the New Congress
Elections have consequences, and so should losing wars. On Nov. 3, voters made that connection themselves. Democrats won both chambers of Congress, and nearly three in four voters told pollsters the Iran war was a major factor in their vote. Vice President JD Vance conceded the point the next day: “The reason we lost is the war.”
The White House set its midterm defeat in motion when the Trump administration underestimated Iran’s willingness to close the Strait of Hormuz, though the military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff had warned the president the regime would, and Pentagon war games had assumed this for decades. When Iran did, the U.S. military could not reopen it against an enemy with no navy. That left only bad options: a ground war Americans did not want, an oil shock from a closed strait, or terms that looked like capitulation to Tehran. Each carried stiff political costs.
How could this happen?
Iran was not an intelligence failure in which analysts missed a threat. It was a policy failure in which experts warned decision-makers who acted against it anyway. The White House, at war with a mythical “deep state,” had dismantled the National Security Council (NSC), the staff that ensures warnings reach the president before he decides, and publicly fired intelligence officers who would not tell him what he wanted to hear. A president who guts the decision-making process and purges his experts will keep blundering into foreseeable—and foreseen—debacles.
Congress has long deferred to the executive on foreign policy. That deference rests on an assumption of good faith, and it cannot extend to a president who ignores and stifles the institutions Congress authorizes and funds. Nor will that deference likely survive an administration that has conducted operations of questionable legality while claiming sweeping executive authority to withhold the information oversight requires. The new majorities cannot guarantee this never happens again, but they have the tools, and a mandate, to make it far less likely.
The Wreckage
The Iran war was not an isolated failure. It followed a year in which the White House dismantled the institutions that should have warned the president against it and, if he went ahead anyway, would have planned for and managed the fallout. The warnings on Hormuz came from military planners, intelligence analysts, and decades of war games—but the degree to which anyone at the White House heeded the warnings is a question only the committees can fully answer. After the war began, the administration’s purges meant there were few to no experts around to figure out what to do next.
Iran was the costliest example of a broader pattern: The White House sidelines or punishes officials whose judgments it dislikes, then acts without them. The same administration captured Venezuela’s leader without notifying the intelligence committees, fired officials whose judgments undercut its legal arguments, retracted published intelligence it disliked, and declassified selected documents to advance a political narrative. Each step weakened the system that tells the president the truth and helps him make decisions informed by reality.
The following accounting shows the scope of what the new Congress must investigate before it can start to rebuild.
The White House
The damage started at the top. The NSC staff sits at the center of the national security system; brings the State Department, Pentagon, and intelligence agencies to the same table; and makes sure the president hears competing views, including intelligence he would rather not hear, before he decides. But on Jan. 22, 2025, the White House sacked 160 career officers detailed to the NSC, with no handover or plan to replace them. A May 2025 restructuring left the NSC with fewer than 50 policy experts, the lowest since the Eisenhower administration, and regular coordination meetings never resumed.
Classified Information
After the purge, as I saw firsthand, the NSC’s intelligence directorate scrambled to determine who was cleared for the President’s Daily Brief, who was read into compartmented programs, and who the president had granted clearances to. New Trump appointees were locked out of key compartments for days, and sometimes weeks, because the officers who could have given them access had been walked out of the building.
The lapses reached the top in March 2025, when then-National Security Adviser Mike Waltz added Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, to a Signal chat in which cabinet officials were planning strikes in Yemen. Meanwhile, the aide who handles most of the president’s paperwork reportedly declined for more than a year to apply for a security clearance.
These are not technicalities. The Pentagon’s inspector general found that details shared in the chat could have endangered U.S. pilots. Clearance rules and the career officers who enforce them ensure that the people handling the nation’s secrets know how to protect them. Fire the officers, ignore the rules, and troops and sources bear the risk.
The Workforce
Within weeks of creating the Department of Government Efficiency, the administration curtailed intelligence hiring and began firing probationary officers en masse, many of them recruited in the previous two years to work on emerging threats such as the Houthis, China, and advanced technology.
Expertise built over decades and lost in weeks will take years to rebuild. Those who remain have learned what happens to colleagues who write unwelcome analysis. Even purged officials are reluctant to speak on the record because of the administration’s retaliation against private employers who do business with the government. The result is a workforce with every incentive to tell the president what he wants to hear, and a president who will not know what he is missing.
The Leadership
Then the purges turned to the community’s most respected officers. In May 2025, then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard fired the National Intelligence Council’s two top officials after they concluded that Nicolás Maduro’s regime was “probably not directing” Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan criminal gang the administration had designated a foreign terrorist organization. That judgment undercut the legal argument for invoking the Alien Enemies Act, which depended on the gang acting at the regime’s direction.
In August 2025, Gabbard revoked the clearances of at least 37 officials via a memorandum, among them a senior CIA Russia analyst who oversaw the assessment of Russia’s 2016 interference. The same week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) after his agency’s battle damage assessment on Iran contradicted the president. CIA Director John Ratcliffe reportedly referred former director John Brennan to the FBI over his congressional testimony about the Russia assessment—a message to all CIA officers that analysis written years ago could result in a criminal indictment.
Analysts write knowing their work will outlast the administration they serve. If any assessment can be recast as a crime years later, the safe course is to hedge or to avoid conclusions a future president might dislike. That self-censorship does more lasting damage than any single firing.
The Product
The administration has also intervened to expunge the record of analysis it disagrees with. A bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee review had called the 2017 assessment of Russian election interference “a sound intelligence product.” Ratcliffe, however, launched a tradecraft review of it in May 2025, and in February 2026, he ordered the retraction or substantive revision of 19 published products.
In July, the White House declassified a set of intelligence documents, including a CIA note, to claim that a “deep state” conspiracy buried evidence that Beijing interfered in the 2020 election—a finding contradicted by the intelligence community’s own assessment.
Information Flow
When U.S. forces captured Maduro on Jan. 3, after months of CIA and Pentagon planning, Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) confirmed that the White House had not warned the committees, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed it was “not the kind of mission that you can pre-notify.” The White House also folded the NSC legal adviser, who normally reviews covert action programs, into the more politicized White House Counsel’s Office.
Notification is not a courtesy. The law requires that the intelligence committees be kept “fully and currently informed” so that cleared members can weigh an operation’s risks before it proceeds. Cutting out Congress and sidelining the NSC lawyer who rules on legality removes two checks against a disastrous decision.
Enhanced Oversight
With the president still holding the veto pen, and with the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States giving the executive new grounds to resist congressional investigations, Congress should start with what lies firmly within its constitutional authority: preserving the record of the damage to the nation’s institutions and holding hearings to scrutinize the administration’s potentially illegal activity. Congressional committees can fence a share of funding for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), CIA, and DIA until the executive produces the required reports: the legal analysis behind the Maduro operation, the tradecraft review Ratcliffe used to retract 19 products, and a full accounting of ongoing covert action.
Congress has already used this lever in the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2026, and withheld a quarter of the defense secretary’s travel budget until the Pentagon turned over unedited video of its boat strikes. The Senate Armed Services Committee’s version of this year’s bill goes further, holding back 75 percent until the Pentagon turns over unedited video of the boat strikes, hands over the civilian harm investigations into the bombing of an Iranian elementary school and strikes in Yemen, and provides the military’s review of the January operation to capture Maduro. Whether the committee stands by these demands will be an early sign of how hard Congress is willing to push.
Preserve the Record
Documenting the evidence before it is lost, and before the responsible officials leave government, will be among the first tasks. The committees should demand a full accounting of the damage lost in the purges, including the officers who were fired, pushed out, or offered deferred resignations, and demand justifications for the DNI-led firings.
The committees should also send preservation letters to the ODNI, CIA, DIA, and the White House on day one of the new Congress. Committees should take testimony from former officials, in open session if they are willing and in closed session if not. They could ask the Government Accountability Office to audit the Department of Government Efficiency’s cuts and aim to produce a public report in the tradition of the Church Committee, whose 1975 investigation led to the creation of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Testimony taken now is the foundation for the reform program that should follow and provide a record the administration cannot rewrite, and these steps would also put appointees and career officials on notice that their personal exposure will outlast the administration.
Expose Abuses
Congress should investigate the White House’s mishandling of classified information and security clearances beginning before Inauguration Day, when the incoming president reportedly waived normal FBI checks. The committees should subpoena officials involved in the Signal chat, the routing of presidential documents through aides who lack security clearances, the declassification of intelligence for political purposes, the revocation of clearances without evidence or appeal, and the reported exposure of an undercover officer by Gabbard.
Covert Action
Congress should demand a full accounting of covert action under this administration. In August, the Washington Post reported that a covert CIA program was behind attacks on Ecuadorian fishing boats near the Galápagos Islands that no government has acknowledged and that the Pentagon denies conducting. One vessel vanished in January with eight crew members, none of whom have been found. Survivors described drones dropping explosives and being bound and hooded by armed, English-speaking men wearing American flag patches who handed them off to authorities in El Salvador. Congress has never authorized the use of lethal force against people suspected of noncapital crimes, and any covert action requires notifying the intelligence committees.
The committees should document each reported strike for future investigations, determine whether contractors took part, and establish who now performs the legal review the NSC legal adviser once conducted before operations proceed. Looking ahead, the committees should demand a briefing on every covert action finding in force and fence funding for those programs until the administration commits to notifying them before operations begin.
Statutory Reform
An executive branch that no longer acts in good faith should no longer receive deference from Congress over its foreign policy. The framers already provided the remedy through the Constitution’s separation of powers, enforced through statutory friction: requirements that slow the president down, force a paper trail, and give Congress time to act before the damage is done. Congress should write these requirements into must-pass legislation such as the National Defense Authorization Act.
Protect the Analysis
Congress should codify the analytic standards in Intelligence Community Directive 203 and bar political appointees from withdrawing or rewriting a published assessment—as Ratcliffe did with 19 products in February—without giving the intelligence committees a written explanation. It should also require that the White House identify declassified intelligence’s originating agency and date, and give the analytic ombudsman, the official analysts turn to with concerns about politicization, inspector-general-style protections so that whoever holds the post cannot be fired for doing the job.
Protect the People
Congress should enact firm limits on security clearance revocations and reinforce the appeals process to ensure that clearances cannot be weaponized against the workforce. It should require advance notice to committees before senior analytic officials are removed and bar nondisclosure agreements that would keep officers and whistleblowers from contacting committees or inspectors general. Congress can also lay the groundwork for future rebuilding by expanding authorities to reinstate officers who were pushed out and easing the hiring of mid-career officers to replace lost expertise.
To be sure, the executive will fight much of this, casting funding fences and notification requirements as encroachments on the president’s Article II authority, and after Trump v. United States, some courts may agree. That is not a reason to hold back. Legislation that draws a veto or a lawsuit forces the administration to defend its conduct in public and builds a record a future president can use to course correct.
The Groundwork for a Future Administration
Congress should preserve the institutions and people a future president will need to rebuild. This need not be partisan. Republicans helped build the oversight system now under assault, and many have broken with the White House over its warming to Russia and its hostility toward Ukraine and America’s allies. Working-level analysts are still doing honest work. Congress should ensure their expertise survives and their work is not in vain.
This administration will end, but the record Congress builds will endure. Every hearing held, document preserved, and law written can enable a future reckoning. The institutions and expertise Congress saves now are what a future president will inherit—and the foundation for rebuilding what this administration destroyed.
