Project 2025's Intelligence Overhaul: A Blueprint for Politicization
Project 2025's intelligence proposals—from a 60-day partisan review of covert actions to reshaping personnel rules and invoking discredited controversies—would dismantle political neutrality in the U.S. Intelligence Community, replacing professional judgment with loyalty tests.
Project 2025’s intelligence chapter (pp. 211–212) presents itself as a reform document aimed at depoliticizing the IC, but a close reading reveals the opposite: it is a detailed blueprint for subordinating intelligence assessments to White House political control. The proposed 60-day review of all covert action findings, conducted by an NSC Senior Director independent of the agencies, would inject partisan oversight into typically compartmented operations, creating a mechanism for canceling or greenlighting activities based on political alignment rather than mission necessity. Heritage’s own language concedes this: the review is to align covert actions with the ‘President’s foreign policy goals,’ not statutory requirements or interagency consensus.
The personnel reforms are similarly double-edged. While the IC does face genuine challenges in hiring and security clearance processing (the 600-day backlog cited by CIA Director Burns is real), Project 2025’s proposed ‘Up and Out’ policies and mobility agreements at the GS-14/15 level are classical loyalty tests dressed in management-speak. The document explicitly ties these changes to purging officers who ‘no longer perform at a high capacity are management-driven do not serve the IC’s changing needs’—code language that has historically been used to target analysts who produced assessments inconvenient to a given administration. Most telling is the section on ‘Preventing the Abuse of Intelligence for Partisan Purposes,’ which itself invokes the debunked Trump-Russia collusion narrative and the Hunter Biden laptop episode as examples of politicization. By framing career professionals’ adherence to legal and ethical standards as the problem, Project 2025 would replace institutional firewalls with executive loyalty, leaving the IC vulnerable to exactly the kind of top-down manipulation it claims to oppose.
The humanitarian alternative
Strengthen nonpartisan intelligence by codifying the ODNI's independence from White House political direction, reinstating congressional notification requirements for covert action, and investing in security clearance reforms that prioritize background thoroughness over speed. Protect whistleblower rights and create a dedicated inspector general for IC politicization. Promote 'up-or-out' reforms only with strong career-service input to avoid politicized purges.
Original source — excerpted
project2025 Project 2025 ch. 8: Media Agencies (pp 244-245)"— 211 — Intelligence Community Immediately after the inauguration, the President should task the NSC’s Senior Director for Intelligence Programs with conducting a 60-day review of any current covert action findings, including their effectiveness; evaluating new covert actions that might be needed to implement the President’s foreign policy goals; and report- ing back to the President. Such an assessment should be conducted independently of the agencies responsible for the actions under review. As part of the review, the Senior Director for Intelligence Programs should identify which departments or agencies, such as the CIA or DOD, are best equipped to achieve the objectives set out in new and existing findings. After the 60-day review, the President should demand creative thinking and a clear strategy as to how covert action fits within the President’s broader foreign policy strategy, to include possibly modifying or rescinding any current findings, drafting new findings, and streamlining or eliminating needless bureaucracy, par- ticularly at State, to facilitate more expeditious decisions on tactical covert action. Careful thought should be given to the metrics by whi…"