John A. Gentry

Give the missions to somebody else.

That will get money and missions will get the attention of bureaucrats.

And a third one that would particularly affect CIA, because even though the 2000 Reform Act that I mentioned moved the production of the President's Daily Brief from CIA to the ODNI, CIA people are still mainly responsible for doing it.

Public information is that most of the articles now are still written by CIA people.

So if you have ongoing PDB problems of the sort that I mentioned on the COVID story, then what you might do is say, okay, I see you're out of the PDB business.

We're moving the production of the President's Daily Brief to the White House.

So you give us the raw reports and we'll establish a small organization within the White House to make the briefings for the president.

So that's a major slap in the face at the ODNI and again at CIA too.

So that would get their attention.

So, come back, what are the risks there?

Well, I suppose there are some risks.

President Nixon actually proposed this for a time, and it sort of occurred during his second term for a while, Henry Kissinger.

was the fellow who ran it.

But there really has not been a danger of politicizing this kind of activity as done in two other countries.

So the British Joint Intelligence Committee and the new Australian ODNI equivalent do this.

They get information from the various agencies and then distill it within the

within the executive office of the prime minister in their case.

And by all of the accounts that I've seen, this has worked well and there haven't been politicization problems.

But in this case, you could help eliminate, not eliminate, but reduce presidential concern that there is a bias within the intelligence business.

And this is not a made-up concern.