director of national intelligence (DNI), head of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC), a collection of 18 military and civilian intelligence agencies. With the support of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the DNI runs the National Intelligence Program, serves in the president’s cabinet, and acts as the government’s principal adviser on all intelligence matters regarding national security. The DNI is appointed by the president with the advice and consent of the Senate.
The position of director of national intelligence came into existence with the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, which amends the National Security Act of 1947. Under the law, the director has a number of responsibilities, including providing intelligence to the executive and legislative branches of government, establishing the IC’s objectives and priorities, handling the IC’s annual budget, and coordinating with other organizations and agencies, both foreign and domestic. While performing these tasks, the director collaborates closely with the principal deputy director of national intelligence, another president-appointed, Senate-approved official.
Before the DNI’s establishment, the leader of the Intelligence Community was the director of central intelligence (DCI), who also served as head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). As early as 1955, however, a study by Congress recommended that the DCI appoint a deputy to run the CIA so that the director could concentrate wholly on coordinating the full IC. The idea continually resurfaced thereafter in various studies, but it lacked the necessary support until the release of the 9/11 Commission Report in July 2004, which recommended the establishment of a DNI as one of many measures to prevent future intelligence failures. That September, U.S. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine introduced what would become the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, which would be voted through Congress in October and signed into law by Pres. George W. Bush on December 17, 2004.
The first director of national intelligence was former U.S. ambassador to Iraq John Negroponte, who was appointed by Bush and sworn into office on the day of his confirmation by the Senate, April 21, 2005. Negroponte began the process of knitting together a sprawling bureaucracy with roughly 100,000 people spread across then 16 agencies; initial steps included creating a standard community-wide security badge and establishing a Library of National Intelligence to serve as a central repository for all intelligence reports. Tellingly, the president’s daily security briefing soon came to include information from the entire IC, rather than just the CIA. Under Negroponte’s administration the IC also began sharing far more of its information with U.S. allies by opening up some of its computer databases for their use.
In early 2007 Negroponte left the ODNI to rejoin the Department of State. He was replaced by Mike McConnell, a former director of the National Security Agency (NSA). McConnell continued Negroponte’s integration of the IC and worked with the White House to update Executive Order 12333, which provides fundamental guidance for intelligence agencies. Controversially, McConnell also advocated for changing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA) to allow the IC to obtain intelligence from the telecommunications of “foreign targets” without court orders. McConnell’s desired adjustments to FISA were signed into law as the Protect America Act of 2007 and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008.
After being nominated by Pres. Barack Obama, Dennis Blair became the third director of national intelligence on January 29, 2009. Blair’s term was short-lived, as Obama asked for his resignation on May 20, 2010. Blair is perhaps most remembered by the public for controversially testifying to Congress on February 3, 2010, that the IC could assassinate U.S. citizens if they were working with terrorists. Within the government, however, his time would primarily be marked by a power struggle with the CIA over station chief appointments, infighting that many commentators would consider the reason for his dismissal.
On August 9, 2010, Blair’s temporary replacement, acting director David Gompert, stepped aside for James Clapper, a retired Air Force lieutenant general who had previous experience in running intelligence agencies. Under Clapper, the position of deputy director for intelligence integration was created, and the budget for the National Intelligence Program was brought under the authority of the ODNI.
Clapper would face more public scrutiny than any previous DNI after the 2013 Edward Snowden leaks occurred on his watch. Because of Snowden’s revelations, Clapper was forced to apologize to the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee for testifying that the NSA did not conduct surveillance on U.S. citizens, a falsehood for which he was accused by many of criminal perjury. Obama nevertheless continued to support Clapper, retaining him in office until the end of the president’s term in 2017.
Pres. Donald Trump appointed Dan Coats, a U.S. senator from Indiana who previously served on the Senate Intelligence Committee, as the nation’s fifth DNI on March 16, 2017. Coats later angered Trump by defending the consensus of the intelligence community that Russia had meddled with the U.S. presidential election of 2016, a fact that the president routinely denied. On July 28, 2019, Trump announced on the social media website Twitter (now X) that Coats would depart from his post on August 15. No reason for Coats’s dismissal has ever been given, but there was later speculation that Trump removed Coats because of the DNI’s reaction to Trump’s telephone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky on July 25. During that call, Trump seemed to pressure Zelensky to help besmirch Democratic presidential candidate and former vice president Joe Biden.
Following Coats’s exit, Trump nominated John Ratcliffe, a Republican U.S. representative from Texas, to “rein in” an intelligence community that Trump claimed had “run amok.” Ratcliffe’s nomination was controversial, as he had little relevant experience and was later found to have inflated his résumé. The furor was strong enough that Trump briefly withdrew his nomination of Ratcliffe, but the president later re-nominated him, and he ultimately received the Senate’s approval by a narrow margin. He was sworn in on May 26.
A month before the November 2020 election, Ratcliffe declassified and released Russian disinformation claiming that 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had plotted to associate Trump with Vladimir Putin and Russia’s election interference. This was done despite the fact that the IC considered the allegation to be without merit and opposed its publication. The New York Times noted in its coverage of the disclosure that the release “appeared to be a bid to help Mr. Trump politically.”
On January 21, 2021, Avril Haines was sworn into office as DNI in the cabinet of Pres. Joe Biden after receiving broad bipartisan approval in the Senate. A former deputy director of the CIA, Haines was the first woman to hold the office.