Burning Down the House:

The US Intelligence Community and Us.

  • The United States is Canada’s most important intelligence partner. Any degradation of US intelligence capability will have an immediate impact on our own intelligence capability, especially around critical threats, like cybersecurity.
  • Deep cuts to US intelligence community budgets and staffing levels, along with efforts to compel institutional compliance with the administration’s strategic goals, will have a profound impact on the ability of key agencies to function effectively.
  • Buyouts and cuts will likely precipitate an intelligence “brain drain,” and will affect the response to key threats like cybersecurity and foreign interference.
    Ambient political pressure may also skew intelligence estimates, leading agencies to tell the administration what it wants to hear, not what it needs to hear.
  • If the US administration persists in viewing Canada as a national security threat, then we could find ourselves the target of intelligence operations, rather than a trusted partner.
  • US scepticism around multilateralism and global intelligence and defence partnerships could have consequences for the future of the Five Eyes Alliance. Meanwhile, US allusions to the ejection of Canada from the Alliance represent a worrisome possibility.

Slash…

The Trump administration has signalled its intention to make significant personnel cuts in the US intelligence community, a plan with major potential impact not only for the United States but for its allies. In early May, reliable US government sources told US media that staffing levels at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) will be reduced by about 1,200 positions over the next few years. That represents about 5.5% of the estimated number of CIA employees (the actual figure is classified). 

A few days later, sources revealed that “thousands more” will be cut from other parts of the community. These include at least 2000 positions – more than 6.5% of the total – at the National Security Agency (NSA), which is responsible for signals intelligence and cryptology.

…and Burn

Certainly, the prospect of cuts to flagship agencies like CIA and NSA capture public and media attention. But they are part of a much more sustained trend across the US intelligence community that began soon after this administration took office. In March, it cut $10 million in funding from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA). The funding cuts targeted programs that dealt specifically with cyber threat intelligence related to election fraud at the state and local level. And in early April, Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, stood up a task force to declassify information deemed in the public interest. The task force will also “improve efficiency” across the intelligence community, including the targeting of “wasteful spending” and “cutting bureaucracy,” and will investigate the “weaponization” of intelligence under previous administrations.

Uprooting the Deep State

The Trump Administration has made it clear that it views the US security and intelligence community as incompetent, regularly dismissing and disregarding its estimates and analysis and contradicting and belittling its officers, analysts and executives. And the president himself has characterized it as a “deep state” dedicated to undermining both him and his administration. This explains the installation of loyalists – many of whom seem to have few qualifications for their jobs – at the helm of key agencies and institutions, like FBI (Patel), ODNI (Gabbard), CIA (Ratcliffe, a Trump loyalist with minimal intelligence experience) and the Department of Defense (Hegseth, within whose purview NSA falls).  

The consequences of this overt politicization for the overall welfare of the community are already observable, even by US standards, where patronage appointments of senior officials are common under any administration. These range from Secretary Hegseth’s (and now former National Security Advisor Waltz’s) misuse of civilian communication networks to the questions that swirl around ODNI Gabbard’s relationships with problematic foreign regimes, to DCI Ratcliffe’s repeated dismissals of Russia as a threat to the United States.

DOGEing and Weaving

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) does not seem to be as prominent in planned cuts to the intelligence community as it is in similar initiatives in the wider US civil service. Most of the statements around intended downsizing have originated from within the agencies themselves, rather than from Elon Musk or the White House. From the administration’s perspective, there are probably good reasons for this, including plausible deniability. If this all ends badly, may go the reasoning, it can’t be directly attributed to us. 

Whatever DOGE’s visibility, however, its influence is profound. Its wide access to the US government IT network will inevitably allow it into systems that are adjacent to, if not components of, intelligence community data holdings. And DOGE’s role as the administration’s ideological enforcer and scourge of the “deep state” seems to be reflected in the intelligence community downsizing, which may be less about efficiency than it is about compliance.

Spending Intellectual Capital

While reductions of 5% and 6.5% at key agencies may not seem like much, they still represent a significant portion of the workforce, especially if they target professional and senior ranks. The loss of expertise and “authoritative presence” affects mission capability and unsettles remaining employees. And voluntary “fork in the road” buyouts that form an important part of the administration’s downsizing strategy regularly backfire: the highest performing, most qualified employees are often the first to leave, because their skills are both transferable and highly marketable. Notably, in February, CIA was the first national security agency to offer across-the-board voluntary buyouts to its employees. 

There are real consequences to this combination downsizing and ideological cleansing of the US intelligence community. A leaner intelligence community is not necessarily weaker. But if it is talent and experience, or even youthful energy, that is on the block, then the community loses its intellectual capital. And there are indicators that malicious actors, notably Russia and China, are actively attempting to recruit disgruntled former US government employees (not just intelligence officers and analysts) whose jobs have been lost to DOGE cuts.

When Intelligence Is No Longer Intelligence

The purpose of any intelligence agency is to produce analysis, estimates and advice based on what is known, not on what the client expects or believes to be true. An intelligence community that is compliant in this way, whether out of fear or conviction, can no longer be said to be truly functional. Indeed, the US intelligence community’s (CIA in particular), pivot to fentanyl and fentanyl trafficking groups as one of its major priorities (normally within the remit of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Customs and Border Protection, and state and local law enforcement) may be an indicator that it is already aligning itself with the particular concerns of the White House.

Why Do We Care?

Any degradation of the US intelligence community represents a serious problem for Canada, especially at a time when every aspect of the US – Canada relationship is uncertain.

Intelligence and National Security

In Canada, we tend to think of “defence” in the physical sense – aircraft, warships, missile-defence and early-warning systems and, if necessary, actual “boots on the ground” personnel. Since the end of the Second World War, Canada has relied, to one degree or another, on the American “umbrella” for its national security. But intelligence cooperation and assistance are a critical component of our national defence “grand strategy,” and the United States is our most important partner in this regard.

Target Canada?

Canadian and US agencies routinely work together and rely heavily on each other for insight and expertise. Any loss of operational capability in the US intelligence community represents a net loss for us as well, particularly in highly critical areas like cybersecurity and foreign interference. As above, these are two priorities that are highly likely to be affected by both cuts and political considerations. And given the US preoccupation with the perceived threat along the Northern border (discussed in previous CIBs) the US intelligence community’s prioritization of fentanyl trafficking could transform Canada into a target rather than a trusted partner.

Transactional Intelligence Policy and the Five Eyes

This US administration routinely expresses deep scepticism around multilateral groupings and global alliances that do not meet its immediate political or ideological needs. Intelligence sharing agreements are not exempt from this. The Five Eyes Alliance – another product of the Second World War – is the most durable and longest standing intelligence sharing agreement on the planet and is critical to the security and defence of its member nations: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. The United States has always played an outsize role in the Five Eyes. If the current administration decides that Five Eyes membership is no longer to its advantage, the future of the rest of the alliance would be in doubt. And if the administration’s targeting of Canada actually reached the point of ejecting us from the alliance (as floated by senior White House advisor on trade, Peter Navarro, in February), then we would face the long and hard task of rebuilding our strategic alliances, and large components of our intelligence capability, from scratch.

This assessment is based on information current as of 1200 hours ADT on May 14, 2025.