Fundamentally reforming the intelligence community is an urgent task for the second Trump administration. If the White House fails to reshape U.S. intelligence, any future Republican president will confront even worse partisan harassment than President Donald Trump faced from the “deep state” during his first term.

Such root-and-branch reforms cannot originate with the executive branch. Besides, that’s a dead letter since Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has fallen out of favor with the White House over her strange statements about Iran’s nuclear program. Perhaps that’s just as well, since the inexperienced Gabbard had little credibility with the intelligence community anyway.

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Fixing American intelligence, therefore, falls to Congress, both legally and practically. Here, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has taken a step toward major changes to the intelligence community by introducing the Intelligence Community Efficiency and Effectiveness Act.

While much of the content of Cotton’s proposed act is difficult to dispute, some of its big changes are nothing short of disastrous, promising a decisive move away from meaningful reform.

First, the good parts. Cotton’s proposal for a significant slim-down of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which was created after the 9/11 terrorist attacks to centralize U.S. intelligence, but which over the last couple of decades became the usual bloated Beltway bureaucracy, is highly appropriate. Giving ODNI a major haircut and slimming its staff to 650 (its current staffing is around 1,700, though most of those personnel are on loan from intelligence agencies) won’t harm critical missions. Wise, too, is Cotton’s call for halting any funds for diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in U.S. spy agencies.

Some of Cotton’s proposed changes represent spook inside baseball, for instance, transferring the ODNI National Counterproliferation and Biosecurity Center’s mission to the CIA, and redesignating the ODNI National Counterterrorism Center as the National Counterterrorism and Counternarcotics Center, limiting its mission to foreign intelligence. These are broadly uncontroversial, as are Cotton’s recommendations to move some other ODNI offices around.

Cotton’s call for disbanding the National Intelligence University, which started in the 1960s and was transferred to the ODNI recently, represents small potatoes in the big spook bureaucracy, but is perhaps unwise given that NIU offers a classified higher education to personnel that can’t be replicated in civilian academia.

What’s not a trivial matter is Cotton’s proposal to eliminate the ODNI National Counterintelligence and Security Center while transferring its important mission to the FBI. Cotton wants to disband the NCSC by rolling it into the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division. This is the same FBI that’s become infected by wokeness and still can’t police its own big corruption scandals.

There are lots of fair criticisms of the NCSC, which was created in 2001, and this column has made them: It’s small and underfunded, it lacks oversight over the national counterintelligence mission, and above all, it doesn’t have the authority it needs to lead and shape American counterintelligence. The Biden administration largely ignored the NCSC.

However, Cotton moves intelligence reform in the completely wrong direction by handing the national strategic counterintelligence portfolio to the FBI, which has proven itself time and again incapable of managing that critical mission effectively, without partisan political interference.

After all, this is the same FBI that made an embarrassing hash of Operation Crossfire Hurricane, becoming an appendage of “resistance” Democrats, then helped Democrats and their lying spy allies stifle discussion of Hunter Biden’s dodgy laptop just in time for the 2020 election. The FBI’s inappropriate dominance in U.S. counterintelligence, which stands as an anomaly among Western democracies, already represents a grave threat to American freedom and civil liberties, while Cotton’s inexplicable proposal to give the FBI even more power to root out foreign spies will make this bad situation worse.

The proper reform path is to take the counterintelligence mission away from the FBI altogether by creating a stand-alone domestic intelligence agency without law enforcement powers. Rolling the NCSC into that new outfit would be logical. Folding the NCSC into the FBI is a recipe for more tactical counterintelligence, as police prefer, at the expense of strategic focus on major spy threats, China above all, while increasing risks to American civil liberties.

NEPA IS BROKEN BUT THE STATES CAN FIX IT

Counterintelligence circles in Washington, D.C., are somewhat mystified by Cotton’s spy-hunting concept, which represents doubling down on failure while promising future problems for Republicans. “Does he want another Crossfire Hurricane?” as a senior intelligence official asked me, puzzled, about the senator after reading his proposed legislation.

Let’s applaud Cotton for seriously attempting intelligence reform, sooner rather than later. But his proposals regarding changing counterintelligence represent a large-scale disaster waiting to happen, for both U.S. national security and his own party.

John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.