I am obliged to open with a disclaimer of sorts.
Faithful readers know of my visceral antipathy towards Donald Trump whose idea of governance is largely driven by vindictiveness and reprisal. So, the crux of this column should not be construed as an endorsement or hearty praise.
Still, there is one aspect of Trump’s blunt, arbitrary determination to wield a fiscal machete to the federal government that, in my view, makes, dare I say it, some sense and that other presidents and prime ministers ought, belatedly, to consider.
For much of my career as an investigative reporter, I trained a jaundiced eye on the unchecked powers and unlimited resources of so-called “intelligence” services that rarely, if ever, suffered any tangible repercussions of their disastrous litany of errors and egregious, law-violating excesses.
Often, those errors and excesses have had profound and lasting strategic and human consequences, yet the spies and the shrouded-in-unnecessary-secrecy institutions they work for have, invariably, been rewarded with more resources, rather than restrained or sanctioned.
Instead, for too long, both Republican and Democratic presidents have fuelled the security Leviathan without hesitation or pause.
For too long, intelligence agencies have operated as states within states, shielded from scrutiny by national security pretence and a complicit press. They lie with impunity. They leak selectively to tame reporters when it suits them. They destroy lives using the convenient cover of “top secret”.
For too long, oversight has been a punchline. Accountability is for whistleblowers, who are hunted, jailed or exiled.
In his own clumsy, erratic way, Trump is doing what Barack Obama and Joe Biden were too conditioned or culpable to do: he’s pumping the emergency brake on a runaway train.
Trump’s qualified insurgency deserves attention. Not because he’s a principled reformer – he isn’t. But because, by instinct or spite, he is threatening the sanctity of institutions that have earned and deserved a reckoning for decades.
In this context, I welcomed the White House’s decision to begin pruning America’s pervasive national security state. It’s a promising start.
In early May, there were two announcements that sent, I suspect, a shudder through the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and triggered a predictable bout of apoplexy among their many obsequious allies in the media, wailing about how the “cutbacks” would fatally undermine America’s safety and embolden its adversaries.
Reportedly, the Trump team is poised to ask Congress to trim the budgets of the DEA, FBI and other Justice Department law enforcement offices by $585m in 2026.
The doomsday warnings are as silly as the wind-up marionettes issuing them, since the agencies will keep much of their multibillion-dollar coffers to “fight” crime and terrorism – homegrown or otherwise.
Even the modest snipping is a welcome signal that the de rigueur annual budget increases may be over – finally.
America’s G-men and women should be relieved that the cuts do not go much deeper and wider, given Trump’s belief that the FBI, in particular, was responsible for many of the tectonic legal troubles he faced before a divided Supreme Court granted presidents broad immunity from prosecution.
Despite the parochial motivation and their limited scope, the proposed cropping of the FBI’s brimming cash box is a necessary, long-overdue first step in clipping America’s bloated national security bureaucracy.
Towards that agreeable end, Trump and company also plan to cut thousands of jobs throughout the mushrooming US “intelligence community,” including 1,200 positions at the CIA over the next several years.
On cue, news of the downsizing has provoked hysterical howls among Democrats and former members of the “intelligence community” who litter US cable news networks as national security “consultants” or “experts” and are treated with cloying deference by their CNN and MSNBC hosts.
The instructive irony, of course, is that congressional Democrats once chaired committee hearings that exposed the “intelligence community’s” wanton disregard for the Constitution and the supposedly sacrosanct rights of Americans.
Those responsible days are decidedly over.
Supine Democrats and the “progressive” journalists who populate “progressive” TV news networks and the “progressive” editorial pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post, now rush to defend the spooks and their indispensable duties from a retributive rogue president intent on putting the CIA on a tardy diet.
Oh, how times and attitudes have changed.
Apparently, the absent-minded liberal intelligentsia need reminding that the CIA has deceived politicians and reporters as a matter of standard protocol. It has subverted democracies abroad, and its covert, blood-stained designs are well remembered from Santiago to Guatemala City and beyond.
It is an emetic sight watching career Democrats – who spent the better part of the Bush years denouncing illegal wiretaps and black sites – recoil in performative horror at the suggestion that the CIA and its brethren have grown too powerful, too arrogant and too dangerous.
And the FBI? The holy shrine of J Edgar Hoover? My goodness. These are the same vaunted, buttoned-down agents who tried to ruin Martin Luther King Jr, who infiltrated peace movements, who surveilled Muslims en masse after 9/11.
Their sanctimonious defenders in newsrooms seem to have buried the blatant fact that the bureau only earned its halo when it became politically expedient to paint it as a bulwark against Trumpism.
This is the liberal establishment’s hypocritical secret: they love order more than justice, power more than truth. So long as the right people are holding the guns and the surveillance keys, they’ll cheer.
The status quo-friendly stable of malleable politicians in Ottawa, London and Canberra – even those who campaign on transparency and reform – cave once they’re inside the palace. They start parroting the briefings, mouthing the jargon, justifying the surveillance. The machinery is too big, too opaque, too entrenched.
Trump, for all his manifest ugliness and corrosive faults, has, in this important instance, bucked the stubborn orthodoxy.
It is possible to lasso cops and spies. But this requires will, resolve, and an understanding that their authority is upheld by myths – myths of necessity, permanence, and the ruse that their power is natural or inevitable.
It can and must be contested.
