WASHINGTON — Donald Trump has named Bill Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, acting director of national intelligence, placing a loyalist with no known intelligence background over the country’s 18 spy agencies.
Pulte replaces Tulsi Gabbard, who resigned effective June 30 after falling out of favor with Trump. The appointment gives Pulte control over the Office of the Director of National Intelligence while he remains head of the FHFA, the agency that oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Pulte is 38 and has built his political profile as a Trump ally willing to target the regimes enemies through mortgage-related allegations.
Trump has made clear that Pulte’s job is to cut the office down and bring it more directly under the command of the executive, telling reporters that the intelligence office had been “way too high for way too long.” Pulte began moving against personnel before a permanent director can been installed. Trump said Pulte could “do a lot of the hard work,” clearing the way so the next nominee would not have to carry out the purge directly.
The removals moved quickly. Less than a week after Pulte took over, more than 50 career and political staff members were dismissed or returned to their home agencies. Political appointees connected to Gabbard were among those removed, while major reductions were expected at the National Counter-terrorism Center. Pulte also reportedly requested lists of hundreds of additional employees who could be targeted for removal.
The purge is aimed at command over the security apparatus. The Trump regime is moving to discipline the intelligence bureaucracy, strip out unreliable personnel and bring the spy agencies into closer alignment with a hardening executive power. The intelligence apparatus has always served the ruling class at home and abroad, from coups and counterinsurgency to spying on oppressed peoples, Communist organizations, anti-war activists and national liberation movements. Under Trump, the old bourgeois claim that the spy agencies stand above politics is proven for the farce it is in public view. The regime is openly subordinating the intelligence bureaucracy to loyalty, factional revenge and the preparation of domestic reaction.
Gabbard’s exit also came as new reporting revived scrutiny of her family’s long-standing ties to the reactionary Chris Butler and the Science of Identity Foundation, an offshoot of Hare Krishna that former members have described as a cult. Leaked documents reportedly showed Butler and his inner circle attempting to influence Gabbard’s congressional work, policy positions, television appearances and public messaging between 2011 and 2017. Gabbard and her family have long denied that Butler controlled their politics, but the revelations are damning. They show a former intelligence chief surrounded by religious influence, personal loyalty networks and reactionary forces operating behind the mask of bourgeois public service.
The transition from Gabbard to Pulte marks little change, it is a struggle inside the same repressive state machinery. For the working people, the danger is not that the intelligence agencies will lose their “independence.” Their independence has always been a bourgeois fiction. The danger is that the state’s machinery of surveillance, repression and political targeting is being reorganized more openly for domestic reaction. Control over the security apparatus gives the regime the ability to identify enemies, monitor movements, discipline dissent, shield loyalists and coordinate repression across federal agencies. As the crisis of U.S. Imperialism deepens, the masses must make clear their understand that this machinery will be aimed more sharply at migrants, protesters, workers, oppressed nations and all enemies of the Old State.
[Image Source: The Real Deal]
