The damage that “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) policies are doing to American colleges and universities is increasingly well-known, thanks largely to efforts of the National Association of Scholars and Minding the Campus, but the harm done to U.S. intelligence agencies has not been assessed—until now. My study of the operational effects of DEI policies on the U.S. intelligence community (IC) indicates major damage. These troubles are related. Students indoctrinated in the tenets of DEI are receptive supporters of DEI-related government policies.
Within the U.S. government, the Obama and Biden administrations reoriented agencies’ organizational cultures toward the Marxist tenets of DEI and degraded longstanding and highly effective practices in ways that impaired the government’s performance. Yet, in addition to asserting their value as devices to promote “social justice,” Obama and Biden administration officials claim that DEI policies improve the performance of the IC. In 2021, I published an article that found no empirical support for such claims by then-director of National Intelligence James Clapper and others. Later, I researched the operational consequences—positive and negative—of DEI policies on the IC directly.
Research, including interviews with several dozen current and former intelligence officers, mainly from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), indicates definitively that operational implications of DEI policies are negative in five major, related arenas. First, the heavy-handed orthodoxy of DEI is causing significant self-censorship by personnel who do not support the DEI agenda, as in academia. For example, a now-retired senior CIA analyst manager wrote while still working: “As the workforce has gotten larger, so has diversity. Political correctness rules. With the increased political divide, it is hard to be outspoken. We choose our close colleagues carefully.” Another senior officer at an agency other than the CIA summarized the operational implications of DEI policies, saying, “it negatively affects our mission.” People who distrust each other do not work well together.
Second, numerous current and former CIA operations officers describe many ways in which DEI policies hamper field operations. These include weaker CIA recruits, bad management, tolerance of weak performance in the name of protecting diversity, and the political divisions noted above.
Third, DEI is an ideology designed to influence how intelligence personnel think, which biases analysis and helps generate intelligence failures. In 2023, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence published an internal magazine called the Dive that told employees what to think about race, LGBTQ+, and disability issues. The CIA’s analytic “review processes” were designed to expunge biases of all sorts from published analyses. In sharp contrast, the Biden administration tells employees to adopt politically correct biases.
Fourth, senior IC leaders, especially CIA director John Brennan (2013-2017), invoked the possible threat to DEI policies that candidate and then President Trump posed in 2016 and later to encourage political activism by serving intelligence officers—which primarily took the form of leaks of both accurate and purposefully incorrect information—or disinformation—designed to damage Trump and his administration. This was a massive violation of the longstanding and valuable CIA ethic of apolitical public service.
Fifth, the political activism of intelligence officers—overtly, via leaks, and by tailoring analyses in partisan ways—has led Americans to think increasingly poorly of intelligence, especially of the political activism of intelligence officers. These include perceptions of intelligence by its users, including senior decision-makers. No small number of Republicans, especially, think the IC tried to conduct a “coup” against then-President Trump. Intelligence that is not believed or trusted is not used. Eschewing the use of good intelligence is likely to damage the quality of national decision-making.
The IC’s main clients are senior government decision-makers, but the intelligence agencies also seek to inform citizens in general terms about a secretive part of their government to woo public opinion as an aid to furthering their own parochial interests. Yet DEI-motivated political activism and questionable intelligence judgments have diminished public confidence in the trustworthiness of the agencies, which means diminished faith in the intelligence assessments that presidents use to rationalize their foreign policy judgments. Given the strong evidentiary basis for politicization and worse, it is no surprise that public confidence in intelligence is declining. A Rasmussen poll released in October 2023 found that only 36 percent of American voters believed that intelligence agencies behaved impartially, while 51 percent said the agencies have their own political agendas. Additionally, 65 percent believed it likely that the agencies are influencing corporate media’s coverage of political issues. Another Rasmussen poll released in March 2024 showed that most respondents thought the IC is trying to influence the 2024 presidential election.
While the damage is readily apparent, we do not yet know the full intelligence-related consequences of the DEI agenda. Outsiders, especially, cannot tell the extent or consequences of poor presidential decision-making fostered by poor intelligence. But we can be confident that the intelligence services of America’s adversaries are watching the slow self-destruction of the CIA and other agencies with glee, and that they eventually will exploit weaknesses. Jettisoning DEI in government is the best way to mitigate immediate risks. But abolishing DEI policies and their legacies on campuses is essential if employees’ sympathies for DEI-related government policies are to be expunged over the longer term. College and university campuses remain the primary national intellectual battleground.
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