Turf wars and silence: US intel sharing frays under Trump, officials say

Intelligence sharing across the US government has slipped badly during President Donald Trump's second term, with some reports to Congress and federal agencies slowed or temporarily halted, according to eight current and former officials and people briefed on the matter. The breakdown lands at an awkward moment: the administration is weighing whether to resume strikes on Iran once Tuesday's midterm elections are over. Former officials and outside experts say the gaps risk handing decision-makers a half-finished picture of the threats facing the country, echoing the failures exposed after the Sept. 11, 2001, al Qaeda attacks.

The trouble traces back to Tulsi Gabbard's run as director of national intelligence, when her office and the CIA locked horns. Those tensions have cooled since she resigned in June, but the damage lingers, two US officials said. The clearest marker: the CIA has stopped co-authoring assessments with the National Intelligence Council, the analytical shop inside the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, thinning the reports that stitch together the intelligence community's collective view on subjects like Iran.

Lawmakers and their staffs briefly went without intelligence reports from Gabbard's office in the days after the US military intervention in Iran in June 2025, and again after the capture of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January 2026, two people familiar said. Her team had accused lawmakers of leaking to the press. The disruption had not been reported before. CIA spokesperson Liz Lyons pushed back, saying the agency "participates fully" in producing assessments through the Presidential Daily Brief, which ODNI leads, and through the NIC.

The friction grew out of deep cuts to national security agencies, including ODNI and the CIA, as Trump sidelined officials he saw as disloyal. Two former officials and a current US official said some analysts still on staff now steer clear of assessments that clash with the White House's positions, fearing political blowback. "Analysts still do the work, but this White House has made them irrelevant because the president treats unwelcome information as disloyalty," said Julia Curlee, a former CIA analyst who said she was fired from the Trump National Security Council last year for being transgender. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Officials describe the CIA-ODNI feud as the worst turf war in three decades between two of the government's most important spy agencies. It flared when Gabbard's office revoked the security clearances of current and former intelligence officials a year ago, and got so heated that White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles had to step in several times to cool things down, three former officials said. The National Intelligence Council, long a staple for policymakers shaping foreign policy, lost its main author when the CIA stopped writing into the assessments last year, and it has since slowed production — with none of its reports focused on the war in Iran, five current and former officials said. An ODNI official said the group has kept assessment levels near "historic trendlines," and a US official praised current Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton as "a good steward" of the community who values the NIC.