WASHINGTON — The institution created to prevent the United States from again failing to connect the dots before a catastrophic attack is being dismantled. On the eve of the 25th anniversary of September 11, 2001, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, established in the aftermath of the 9/11 Commission’s findings, has lost much of its staff and authority, while the administration has offered no detailed accounting of what will replace it.
NPR’s national security correspondent reported Tuesday on the scale of President Donald Trump’s restructuring of the intelligence community, a campaign the administration has framed as a fight against what it calls the “deep state” — a term that, in practice, has become a broad label for the professional officials the president has sought to remove.
“We will clean out all of the corrupt actors in our national security and intelligence apparatus, and there are plenty of them,” Trump said earlier this year. The statement was not merely rhetoric. It became policy.
The most visible period of execution came under Bill Pulte, the housing industry executive Trump installed as acting director of national intelligence in June. Pulte directed staff to identify roughly 400 employees to be fired from the National Counterterrorism Center — the body established after 9/11 specifically to coordinate the kind of intelligence-sharing that had failed before the attacks. NBC News reported mass firings at the ODNI as they were taking place.
Jay Clayton, confirmed on a 51-to-47 party-line Senate vote in late July and sworn in as the ninth director of national intelligence on August 3, inherited an office that career intelligence professionals describe as being at a historic low point. The Senate Intelligence Committee had advanced his nomination on a 9-8 party-line vote. Clayton’s confirmation hearings were notable for what they revealed. When senators pressed him to confirm that Joe Biden had won the 2020 presidential election, Clayton declined, saying only that Biden had been “certified” as winner. It was an unusual answer for the country’s incoming top intelligence officer.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who has a closer relationship with the White House than most of his predecessors, has not publicly addressed the ODNI reductions. The CIA has been less visibly disrupted, but officials familiar with interagency coordination say the intelligence-sharing infrastructure that required a functional ODNI to operate is under strain.
Tim Weiner, who has covered the intelligence community for decades, did not soften his assessment when speaking to NPR. “Since the re-inauguration of Donald Trump,” Weiner said, “the architecture of American national security is being destroyed.” A former senior intelligence official was more direct: “All the gains, I think, are gone, and we are in the process of destroying our intelligence community.”
What the 9/11 Commission identified as the central failure of September 2001 was not individual incompetence. It was structural fragmentation: the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA each held pieces of information about the hijackers that, connected, might have interrupted the plot. The DNI position and the ODNI were Congress’s institutional answer to that finding. The National Counterterrorism Center was its operational answer.
Twenty-five years later, the NCTC has lost several hundred staff and the ODNI runs at a fraction of its former capacity. NPR’s reporting on Tuesday, published one day before September 11, 2026, documented an intelligence community that critics say has traded the infrastructure built to prevent another catastrophic failure for the administration’s satisfaction that the “deep state” has been addressed.
What neither the White House nor Director Clayton has yet answered is what successor architecture, if any, is intended. The executive actions have primarily been subtractions: staff reduced, functions returned to individual agencies, coordinating authority diminished. Whether the resulting structure represents a coherent alternative to the post-9/11 model, or simply less capacity by a different name, is the question the 25th anniversary arrives without answering.
