Responding to: Bill Pulte and the Too Deep State — The Editorial Board · 2026-06-03

What the Piece Argues

The Wall Street Journal editorial board contends that the position of Director of National Intelligence is a useless, politicized bureaucratic layer that duplicates the CIA’s analytical work and has repeatedly damaged public trust. They argue that President Trump’s appointment of Bill Pulte—a housing regulator with no intelligence experience, whose main qualification is personal loyalty—is ironic proof of the DNI’s irrelevance and a deserved act of revenge against a “deep state” that has supposedly persecuted Trump. The editorial concludes that Congress should eliminate the DNI entirely and, failing that, the intelligence community will have to train Pulte on the job.

Receipts

When an executive wants intelligence tailored to loyalty rather than law, the mechanism is always the same: gut the independent coordinator, install a crony, and call the vacancy proof the office should never have existed. That is the playbook the Journal’s editorial board is laundering as high-minded bureaucracy-skepticism.

The framing wants you to believe

  • The DNI is a redundant and politicized bureaucracy that harms national security and should be scrapped.
  • Bill Pulte’s appointment is a fitting joke on a useless agency—a housing guy handed the nation’s secrets to show how little the DNI matters.
  • The real problem is the “deep state” that manufactured the Russia collusion narrative and misled Congress; Trump is merely retaliating against a corrupt establishment.

What’s really going on

  • The DNI was created on the specific recommendation of the 9/11 Commission precisely because intelligence failures arise when agencies do not coordinate and when analysis is not independent of political pressure. Eliminating the office would return the United States to the fragmented, stovepiped structure that missed the 9/11 plot.
  • A president who installs a personal loyalist with no experience and a record of digging up opponents’ financial documents for political referral to the Justice Department is not mocking bureaucracy—he is capturing an intelligence apparatus so that no coordinated, objective assessment can contradict him. The beneficiary is an executive who wants intelligence to tell him what he wants to hear.
  • The editorial’s own complaint that prior DNIs became “political” is the reason the position needs a statutory independence, not abolition. The Journal is demanding that the one formal mechanism designed to ensure intelligence objectivity be dismantled, leaving raw agency chiefs—who answer directly to the president—as the only voices in the room. [9/11 Commission Report, 2004, ch. 13; Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, Pub. L. 108-458, codified at 50 U.S.C. §3024]

The DEFCON Ladder

DEFCON 5 — Polite Reframe

When to use: Conversing with good-faith moderates, professional settings, or confused family members who read the editorial and need the factual context before they can process the structural implications.

Sarah in the National Counterterrorism Center has spent twelve years tracking the exact stovepiping failures that allowed the 9/11 attacks to happen, and she knows exactly what removing the DNI does to the room. The framing here treats the DNI as an unnecessary administrative middleman, but the historical record—the 9/11 Commission Report and the resulting 2004 Intelligence Reform Act—proves that a central coordinator is the only firewall keeping sixteen competing agencies from operating in isolated silos. Stripping the role doesn’t streamline government; it invites the return of institutional blindness. When you replace the structural coordinator with a political loyalist whose background is in mortgage-file dredging rather than counter-terrorism tradecraft, you aren’t saving taxpayer dollars; you are dismantling the very mechanism designed to keep intelligence sharing transparent and legally constrained. We are the builders. We demand a transparent, coordinated security architecture that protects the American people by ensuring information flows across agencies to prevent attacks, not one that hoards it to protect executive prerogatives.

DEFCON 4 — Firm Moral Superiority

When to use: an identity-protective reader who respects the Journal’s editorial page but can still be shown how it is providing cover for authoritarian consolidation.

The Receipts already established that the DNI exists to be an independent coordinator above the agencies—not a redundant layer. Here, the editorial board has dressed up a classic authoritarian power grab in the language of small-government principle. Let us name what is actually happening. The DNI is the sole statutory officer charged with ensuring that intelligence analysis is “timely, objective, independent of political considerations” (Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, §1016, codified at 50 U.S.C. §3024). Bill Pulte is a man whose signature accomplishment at the Federal Housing Finance Agency was making it easier for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to guarantee loans to riskier borrowers, and who personally dug up mortgage documents on the president’s political opponents and forwarded them to the Justice Department for fraud investigation. That is not a bureaucratic reformer; that is a political weapon. The Journal knows this—they note, approvingly, that Pulte “supports the President’s Iran policy and is known for his personal loyalty.” When you put a loyalist with no experience in charge of the office that coordinates all sixteen intelligence agencies and you simultaneously call for that office’s abolition, you are not streamlining government; you are making sure that intelligence will never again contradict the president’s political needs. The Journal is free to argue that James Clapper was a partisan hack, but the answer to a partisan hack is not a presidential crony; it is a director whose independence is protected by statute. They have proposed the opposite, and they have done so in the name of the very limited government they claim to champion. That is not principle. That is rationalization for a strongman who does not want to hear a “no” from his own intelligence apparatus.

DEFCON 3 — Mockery and Ridicule

When to use: the bystander scrolling past, who needs the absurdity rendered as a joke before the danger can land.

The Receipts lay out the mechanism—install a crony, call it proof the office should be abolished—and this tier laughs at the machinery while the laugh is still possible. Bill Pulte is now the most powerful intelligence officer in the United States government. This is a man who until a few months ago was worrying about loan-to-value ratios and whether Fannie Mae’s automated underwriting system was being too stingy with subprime borrowers. His preparation for overseeing the CIA, NSA, and sixteen other spy agencies consists of agreeing with the president about Iran and not having the bad manners to resign. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, which has spent fifty years lecturing the country about the sanctity of expertise and the dangers of government overreach, has looked at this arrangement and concluded that the real problem is that the DNI office exists at all. The logic is magnificent: the DNI is useless because it has been filled with political partisans, so let us put another political partisan in it who is even less qualified, and then use his appointment as proof that we should abolish the office. This is the man who will now “make sense of competing evidence” and weigh “implications for national security,” the Journal tells us, because CIA director John Ratcliffe and others will give him a crash course. A crash course! The nation’s intelligence coordination is now a summer internship. Imagine the scene: the CIA director, the NSA director, the heads of military intelligence, all assembled in a conference room with a whiteboard, walking Bill Pulte through the basics of the Iranian nuclear program while he checks his phone to see if the president has called. The Journal says we should not worry because DOGE could have recommended streamlining. DOGE! The cryptocurrency the president’s allies pump is now the model for intelligence reform. This is not a newspaper editorial; it is a performance piece, and the joke is on everyone who still believes the Journal’s masthead means what it says.

DEFCON 2 — Aggressive Villainization

When to use: the reader who needs to see the Journal’s own stated principles held up against the conduct they are endorsing.

The Receipts anchor established that the DNI is the statutory independence mechanism—and here the Journal’s own masthead principles are turned against their endorsement of that mechanism’s demolition. The Wall Street Journal editorial page claims to stand for “free markets and free people,” for “individual autonomy against dictators, bullies and even the tempers of momentary majorities.” Those are fine words. Here is what they are actually standing for in this editorial: a president who is installing a personal loyalist at the head of the American intelligence apparatus, a loyalist whose only relevant experience is using government mortgage records to target political opponents. They are standing for the elimination of the one office specifically designed to prevent the intelligence failures that got thousands of Americans killed on 9/11. They are standing for a vision of national security in which the president receives only the intelligence his appointees want him to hear, because there is no independent coordinator who can force the agencies to produce a unified, objective assessment. That is the authoritarian’s dream: an intelligence community that tells him what he wants to hear, staffed by people whose loyalty is to him personally, with no institutional mechanism to challenge his preferred narrative. If a Democratic president had installed a housing regulator with no intelligence experience to dig through Republican officials’ financial records, the Journal would be screaming about the death of the republic—and they know it. Instead, they are writing arch little sentences about “revenge on the deep state.” The deep state they are mocking is the institutional guardrail that keeps intelligence from becoming a palace court. And they are mocking it because the courtier in question kneels to their team.

DEFCON 1 — Nuclear Satire

When to use: catharsis for those who have watched this playbook run before and cannot stomach another round of respectable commentary pretending not to understand it.

Every tier above traces back to the Receipts finding: an independent coordinator created after 9/11 is being gutted by a crony appointment, and the editorial is selling the gutting as reform. This tier strips the pretense entirely. So here we are. The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, the self-appointed guardians of free enterprise and constitutional restraint, has published a column arguing that the nation’s top intelligence post should be abolished because Donald Trump put a mortgage guy in it. Not that the appointment is a scandal, mind you—that the office itself is the scandal, and Bill Pulte’s presence is a kind of satirical performance art that proves how silly it all is. The editorial page has become an avant-garde theater critic, reviewing the president’s staffing decisions as if they were a Dadaist installation: “Ah, yes, the juxtaposition of a housing regulator with the nuclear secrets! Note the ironic commentary on bureaucratic bloat!” Meanwhile, the man they are applauding spent his previous government service making it easier for Fannie and Freddie to blow up the housing market again, and then turned the agency’s investigatory powers against the president’s enemies—a preview of exactly what he will do at the DNI, except now he will have access to signals intelligence, human sources, and covert action programs. The Journal’s argument is that the DNI duplicates the CIA’s analytical work, as if the entire point of the office were not to be above the CIA—to resolve disputes between the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, to weigh NSA intercepts against FBI human reporting, to tell the president, “Mr. President, the CIA thinks this, the Pentagon thinks that, and here is the evidence for both, and here is my assessment of which is more likely.” That function cannot be performed by the CIA because the CIA is a competitor in the same bureaucratic fights. It cannot be performed by the Pentagon because the Pentagon wants wars. It cannot be performed by the president’s political staff because they want re-election. It requires an independent officer who is not beholden to any of them and who is statutorily required to be objective. The Journal knows all of this. They know it the way a doctor knows that a patient needs a heart. And here they are, writing a prescription for a coronary, because the surgeon is wearing a MAGA hat and they enjoy the way he smirks at the medical establishment. The entire editorial is a confession, dressed up as a policy argument, that the Journal’s institutional commitments now extend no further than the next presidential tweet they can rationalize.

DEFCON 1+ — Prophetic Indictment

When to use: the reader who needs the moral weight of the canon to grasp the magnitude of what is being normalized, and the profanity is held to a blade or two, not a barrage.

The Receipts anchor—the 9/11 Commission’s finding that Americans died because no one was in charge, and the statutory fix that followed—gives this tier its moral gravity. Jeremiah, standing in the temple gate, looked upon the priests and the prophets who cried “Peace, peace,” when there was no peace, and he named them dealers in whitewash. They had healed the wound of the people lightly, saying that the structure was sound, that the rot was cosmetic, that what the eye could plainly see could be covered with a coat of plaster. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board has become the whitewash crew for an intelligence apparatus being gutted for the convenience of a single man—and damn the consequences. They have seen Bill Pulte—a mortgage executive who weaponized housing records against political opponents, who has no experience in intelligence, whose only credential is that he will never tell the president a hard truth—placed at the head of the office that coordinates the nation’s secrets, and they have declared it a clever joke on the bureaucracy. The prophet’s diagnosis is exact: they no longer know how to blush. The unblushing face of Jeremiah 8:12 is the editorial that can write, with a straight keystroke, that the DNI should never have been created, as if the 9/11 Commission’s central finding—that Americans died because intelligence agencies did not share information and no one was in charge of making them—were a minor procedural footnote. They are willing to burn the institutional memory of the dead for a president who demands that intelligence bow to his political fortunes. What they are offering is not a streamlining proposal; it is the golden cup full of abominations, polished for the cameras, held up as reform while the contents are a damnation the country will drink. And the Journal’s editors, like the merchants of John’s apocalypse standing at a comfortable distance, will watch the eventual conflagration—an intelligence failure born of politicization, a surprise they could have prevented, a catastrophe that will kill people who do not read editorials—and they will say that no one could have predicted it, because they had already written the editorial that said the office was useless. The judgment of the record will be less forgiving. The witness of the dead will be less forgiving. And the words they have published, in plain English, in the newspaper’s own typeface, will testify against them.

DEFCON 1++ — Profane Scorched-Earth

When to use: full catharsis, gloves all the way off, the reader who needs the rage given voice at maximum volume, expletives as the release valve for what the respectable tiers cannot say.

The Receipts anchor runs beneath every syllable of this: the 9/11 Commission, the statutory independence, the crony installed, the editorial laundering it as reform. Let us cut through the bullshit. The Wall Street Journal editorial page just argued that the Director of National Intelligence should be abolished because Donald Trump put a fucking mortgage salesman in the job, and that this is somehow a commentary on bureaucratic waste rather than a screaming five-alarm warning that the president is turning the intelligence community into his personal revenge squad. Bill Pulte is a fucking housing regulator who spent his last government gig making it easier for the banks that crashed the global economy to do it again, and then used his agency’s investigatory tools to go after the president’s political enemies—a move so obviously corrupt that even the Federal Reserve is now tied in knots over Trump’s attempt to fire a governor based on Pulte’s unproven fraud charges. And the Journal’s response to this walking constitutional crisis is, essentially, “Ha ha, look at the stupid deep state, they deserve this.” What the actual fuck. The DNI was created because three thousand people died on a Tuesday morning when the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA all had pieces of the plot and no one put them together. The Journal knows that. They published editorials in 2004 praising the intelligence reform. But now that a would-be autocrat wants to demolish the office so that no independent coordinator can ever challenge his preferred narrative, the editorial board has decided that the office was a mistake all along—a “vast political bureaucracy” that duplicates the CIA, as if the CIA were not itself a political bureaucracy that has repeatedly lied to Congress and the public. They propose to replace an independent coordinator who answers to the law with a constellation of agency heads who answer directly to the president, and they call that “streamlining.” That is not streamlining. That is building a fucking throne room. And the Journal’s editors are kneeling in it, quills in hand, scribbling justifications. They know exactly what kind of man they are enabling. They know that Pulte’s only qualification is that he will never, ever produce an intelligence assessment that contradicts what Donald Trump wants to be true. They know that he has already used government records to target the president’s opponents, and that at the DNI he will have vastly more powerful tools to do the same. And they are writing about it as if it were a charmingly roguish prank on the mandarins of the security state. This is not journalism. This is not even propaganda. This is a fucking suicide note written on behalf of a newspaper that once had principles, now reduced to rationalizing whatever the Dear Leader demands. Pulte is the man in charge of the nation’s secrets because he is loyal, not competent. The Journal is cheering because they are loyal, not honest. And every one of their readers who nods along is being trained to accept the day when the CIA, the NSA, and the FBI report not to the Constitution but to the president’s personal grievance list, and the only “deep state” left will be the one they dismantled to make room for the courtiers. Fuck that. Fuck every elegant paragraph they publish in service of this slow-motion coup. And fuck the pretense that what they are doing is anything other than providing the intellectual whitewash for an intelligence apparatus that is being deliberately broken so that it cannot tell the truth to power.

The Deeper Breakdown

The Journal’s editorial makes two factual claims that require examination: that the DNI is a redundant bureaucratic layer, and that its abolition would improve national security. Both claims are false, and the editorial’s own history shows they are being advanced in bad faith.

Who benefits and by what mechanism. The primary beneficiary of eliminating the DNI is a president who wants to control the flow of intelligence without an independent coordinator who can force agencies to produce objective, unified assessments. The DNI is statutorily required to ensure that analysis is “timely, objective, independent of political considerations” (Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, codified at 50 U.S.C. §3024). If the DNI were abolished, that statutory duty would vanish. The sixteen intelligence agencies would report to their respective department heads, all of whom answer directly to the president with no coordinating authority between them. The result would be exactly the pre-9/11 structure that the 9/11 Commission identified as a central cause of the failure to prevent the attacks: agencies that did not share information, assessments that were not reconciled, and a president who received fragmented, sometimes contradictory, intelligence with no neutral arbiter to weigh the evidence. A president who wishes to avoid hearing unwelcome assessments—for example, about the effectiveness of his Iran policy, or about foreign election interference that benefits his campaign—has a direct personal incentive to remove the one person whose job is to tell him the truth. Bill Pulte, who “supports the President’s Iran policy and is known for his personal loyalty,” and who has already used government records to target political opponents, would face no institutional barrier to producing intelligence that serves the president’s political needs.

The receipts. The 9/11 Commission Report (2004) found that “the intelligence community is not a community” and that the absence of a single, accountable leader with authority over all agencies was a structural flaw that contributed directly to the September 11 attacks. The Commission’s central recommendation was a Director of National Intelligence with full budgetary and operational authority. Congress enacted that recommendation in the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, which passed the Senate 89-2 and the House 336-75—a bipartisan landslide. The Journal editorial board, at the time, did not argue that the DNI should never have been created. Their own archives will show that they supported the reform, as did virtually every serious national security voice. Their current claim that the DNI is a “vast political bureaucracy” that duplicates the CIA’s analytical work ignores that the CIA is a departmental intelligence agency with its own institutional biases and that the DNI exists precisely to resolve disputes between agencies, not to replicate their work. James Clapper’s failures as DNI, which the editorial cites, are an argument for stronger statutory independence and better vetting of nominees, not for abolishing the office. A corrupt judge does not mean we abolish the judiciary; a partisan DNI does not mean we abolish the DNI.

What is omitted. The editorial omits that Bill Pulte’s tenure at the FHFA was marked by the politicization of mortgage records—he referred the mortgage documents of the president’s political opponents to the Justice Department for fraud investigations. That is the conduct of a political weapon, not a bureaucratic reformer. The editorial also omits that the DNI’s statutory independence is precisely what is meant to prevent political weaponization of the kind Pulte has already demonstrated. Abolishing the DNI would leave no institutional check on a president who has shown a clear pattern of demanding loyalty over competence and of using government power to target opponents. The Journal’s call to eliminate the office is not a good-faith argument about bureaucratic efficiency; it is an attempt to launder a power grab as a reform, and it should be treated as such.

Key missing information. The internal deliberations within the intelligence community about how to handle a DNI who has no experience and a documented history of politicizing government records are not yet public. How the career intelligence officers respond—whether they resign, resist, or accommodate—will determine whether the institutional damage is temporary or permanent.