President Donald Trump’s initial burst of orders banning “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) initiatives and programs within the federal government is a fine beginning, but more needs to be done to institutionalize the reforms. This task is especially important in the intelligence community (IC), because DEI politicizes intelligence, which must be objective to be most useful. 

But bureaucrats who do not like presidents or their policies chronically pretend to adhere to political appointees’ directives while “waiting them out.” Presidential policies are transient, they reason, while they and their notions endure. Those who use DEI as a tool to spur societal divisions with the ultimate goal of revolution have experienced setbacks in the past century as well as successes, meaning that after Trump’s election in November they knew how to burrow into target organizations, continuing subversive operations deceptively from within. 

Reformers need to know this history and these operational techniques to avoid a now-recurrent error of thinking that a few tactical wins, such as removing DEI from agency websites or corporate announcements of abandonment of DEI policies, means the war is won. It is not. The real struggle has yet to begin. 

Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden successfully transformed the federal government, as Obama put it in 2008, on their way to transforming the country by building radical political activism into agencies’ organizational cultures and incentive systems. These cultural and institutional issues must be addressed at each agency if DEI is to be expunged from the government and society generally.

Obama and Biden issued executive orders in 2011 and 2021, respectively, which put teeth into orders that agencies give demographic identity groups of the Democratic coalition—especially blacks, women, and LGBTQ+ people—preferential treatment in hiring, promotions, awards, and assignments, thereby changing the political orientation of the IC as a whole. The orders established performance standards and penalties for executives who failed to comply. 

IC officials mandated that DEI policies be embedded in everything their agencies did. For example, CIA director William Burns changed the promotion system at the CIA to reflect DEI directives. Burns made DEI adherence a criterion for rating CIA employees’ performance, and personnel who wanted promotion to senior ranks reportedly had to write essay answers to six questions, most of which were DEI-related. CIA chief diversity officer Jerry Laurienti said in May 2024 that he monitored decisions made by panels that decided the promotion of senior officers, vetoing selectees he considered inadequately committed to DEI and promoting DEI zealots instead. 

Obama and Biden administration officials purposefully changed agencies’ organizational cultures. For example, Obama’s last CIA director, John Brennan, wrote that he voted for Gus Hall, the Communist Party USA candidate for president in 1976 because he was dissatisfied with the U.S. system, that he relished opportunities throughout his career to change CIA’s organizational culture in politically salient ways, and that he urged CIA employees in 2016 to actively oppose President-elect and then President Trump. 

Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Avril Haines in 2023 published online a newsletter called The Dive, which told IC employees how to think and communicate about race, gender preferences, and disabled persons, establishing ideological orthodoxy that employees were expected to follow.

Such instructions generate memories that endure. According to a knowledgeable official, the FBI went even further in the Biden years, grading its intelligence analytical products in part on whether they embedded DEI perspectives—blatant politicization reminiscent of the Marxist-Leninist straitjacket that damaged intelligence support to Soviet Communist Party officials for decades.

To make many such matters worse, Brennan and Haines sought to make their cultural changes permanent. That is, political appointees and career intelligence officials in recent years, like the Biden administration generally, tried to “Trump-proof” the IC. 

Haines reportedly convened meetings beginning in February 2024 to design ways to insulate the IC from possible Trump administration reforms. They wanted to hamstring their successors’ ability to reverse their policies, an attitude that is both undemocratic and anti-democratic. The new DNI Tulsi Gabbard and CIA director John Ratcliffe therefore faces a daunting dual challenge: identifying what Obama and Biden administration officials did to thwart them and developing ways to repair recent damage. 

Their goal should be clear: restoration of the venerable norm of apolitical public service.