director of national intelligence

director of national intelligence (DNI), head of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC), a collection of 18 military and civilian intelligence agencies. With the support of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the DNI runs the National Intelligence Program, serves in the president’s cabinet, and acts as the government’s principal adviser on all intelligence matters regarding national security. The DNI is appointed by the president with the advice and consent of the Senate.

The position was created in the wake of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, when it became clear that intelligence agencies were not communicating effectively with each other. The intelligence failures surrounding false reports of weapons of mass destruction that led to the 2003 invasion of Iraq bolstered the case for an independent director who could institute systems whereby key agencies, especially the FBI and the CIA, would work together. One of the requirements for the role, as written into law, is that the DNI must have “extensive national security expertise.” In the decades since its implementation, the director of national intelligence has faced bipartisan criticism for having exactly the problems the position was supposed to address: excessive bureaucracy and polarization.

Creation of the office

Before there was a director of national intelligence, the director of the CIA was responsible for overseeing all elements of the U.S. Intelligence Community.

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The position of director of national intelligence came into existence with the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, which amended the National Security Act of 1947. Under the law the director has a number of responsibilities, including providing intelligence to the executive and legislative branches of government, establishing the IC’s objectives and priorities, handling the IC’s annual budget, and coordinating with other organizations and agencies, both foreign and domestic. While performing these tasks, the director collaborates closely with the principal deputy director of national intelligence, another president-appointed, Senate-approved official.

The idea of reforming the structure of the massive intelligence bureaucracy did not start in the early days of the 21st century. As early as 1955 a study by Congress recommended that the director of central intelligence appoint a deputy to run the CIA so that the director could concentrate on coordinating the full IC. The idea resurfaced periodically, but it lacked the necessary support until the release of the 9/11 Commission Report in July 2004, which recommended the establishment of a DNI office as one of many measures to prevent future intelligence failures. That September U.S. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine introduced what would become the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, which was voted through Congress in October and signed into law by Pres. George W. Bush on December 17, 2004.

Evolution of the role and controversy

The first director of national intelligence was former U.S. ambassador to Iraq John Negroponte, who was sworn into office in April 2005. Negroponte began the process of knitting together a sprawling bureaucracy with roughly 100,000 people spread across then 16 agencies; initial steps included creating a standard community-wide security badge and establishing a Library of National Intelligence to serve as a central repository for all intelligence reports. Tellingly, the president’s daily security briefing soon came to include information from the entire IC, rather than just the CIA. Under Negroponte’s administration the IC also began sharing far more of its information with U.S. allies by opening up some of its computer databases for their use.

In early 2007 Negroponte left the ODNI to rejoin the Department of State. He was replaced by Mike McConnell, a former director of the National Security Agency (NSA). McConnell continued Negroponte’s integration of the IC and worked with the White House to update Executive Order 12333, which provides fundamental guidance for intelligence agencies. Controversially, McConnell also advocated for changing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA) to allow the IC to obtain intelligence from the telecommunications of “foreign targets” without court orders. McConnell’s desired adjustments to FISA were signed into law as the Protect America Act of 2007 and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008.

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After being nominated by Pres. Barack Obama, Dennis Blair became the third director of national intelligence on January 29, 2009. Blair’s term was short-lived, as Obama asked for his resignation on May 20, 2010. Blair is perhaps most remembered by the public for controversially testifying to Congress on February 3, 2010, that the IC could assassinate U.S. citizens if they were working with terrorists. Within the government, however, his time would primarily be marked by a power struggle with the CIA over station chief appointments, infighting that many commentators would consider the reason for his dismissal.

On August 9, 2010, Blair’s temporary replacement, acting director David Gompert, stepped aside for James Clapper, a retired Air Force lieutenant general who had previous experience running intelligence agencies. Under Clapper the position of deputy director for intelligence integration was created, and the budget for the National Intelligence Program was brought under the authority of the ODNI.

Clapper would face more public scrutiny than any previous DNI after the 2013 Edward Snowden leaks occurred on his watch. Because of Snowden’s revelations, Clapper was forced to apologize to the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee for testifying that the NSA did not conduct surveillance on U.S. citizens, a falsehood that many said amounted to criminal perjury. Obama nevertheless continued to support Clapper, retaining him in office until the end of the president’s term in 2017.

Pres. Donald Trump appointed Dan Coats, a U.S. senator from Indiana who had previously served on the Senate Intelligence Committee, as the country’s fifth DNI on March 16, 2017. Coats later angered Trump by defending the consensus of the Intelligence Community that Russia had meddled with the U.S. presidential election of 2016, a fact that the president routinely denied. On July 28, 2019, Trump announced on the social media website Twitter (now X) that Coats would depart from his post on August 15. Coats has said he told the president of his desire to leave the role months before the presidential tweet.

Shortly after he left his role, however, a whistleblower complaint landed on the desk of his interim successor, Joseph Maguire, regarding the propriety of a July 25 call between Trump and Ukrainian Pres. Volodymyr Zelensky. During that call Trump seemed to pressure Zelensky to help implicate Democratic presidential candidate and former vice president Joe Biden in wrongdoing.

Following Coats’s exit, Trump nominated John Ratcliffe, a Republican U.S. representative from Texas, to “rein in” an Intelligence Community that Trump claimed had “run amok.” Ratcliffe’s nomination was controversial, as it broke with the tradition (and legal requirement) that the director of national intelligence have extensive experience in the national security space. Additionally, Ratcliffe was found to have inflated his résumé. The furor was strong enough that Trump briefly withdrew his nomination of Ratcliffe, but the president later renominated him, and Ratcliffe ultimately received the Senate’s approval by a narrow margin. He was sworn in on May 26, 2020.

A month before the November 2020 presidential election, Ratcliffe declassified and released Russian disinformation claiming that 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had plotted to associate Trump with Vladimir Putin and Russia’s election interference. This was done despite the fact that the broader Intelligence Community considered the allegation to be without merit and opposed its publication. The New York Times noted in its coverage of the disclosure that the release “appeared to be a bid to help Mr. Trump politically.”

On January 21, 2021, Avril Haines was sworn into office as DNI in the cabinet of Pres. Joe Biden after receiving broad bipartisan approval in the Senate. A former deputy director of the CIA, Haines was the first woman to hold the office.

Role of intelligence in the second Trump administration

With Trump’s reelection in 2024, he continued the precedent he had set with Ratcliffe by nominating Tulsi Gabbard to be his DNI. Gabbard, a former Democratic member of the House of Representatives and presidential candidate, had left her party and endorsed Trump. While she was a combat veteran and had served on the House Homeland Security Committee, like Ratcliffe she lacked the deep national intelligence expertise that previous DNIs had possessed. Her confirmation hearing was contentious in part because of her positions on Russia and Syria, but she was ultimately approved.

Her tenure was marked by controversy, including congressional testimony about Iran’s nuclear program that prompted Trump to say that she was “wrong.” In January 2026 she was seen in Georgia at the site of an FBI search of Fulton county election offices. The presence of the nation’s top intelligence officer at the seizure of domestic elections data spurred controversy. Gabbard resigned in June 2026 after her husband was diagnosed with cancer.

To succeed Gabbard, Trump nominated Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. While he does not have extensive intelligence experience, he was seen as a potentially stabilizing force for the Intelligence Community. Although his nomination hit a snag when he refused to directly answer a question about who won the 2020 election, he was ultimately confirmed.

Some two decades into the well-intentioned experiment of having a director of national intelligence, the role remains controversial regardless of who holds it. While it is generally regarded as true that early directors enacted protocols and trainings to improve communications, some critics argue that rather than streamlining the process for the sharing of information and operations, the role has proven to be redundant. That, coupled with the fact that—unlike the agencies the office oversees—it lacks actual agents to do the work, has led to questions about whether the role needs to be rethought.

Directors of national intelligence

Here is a look at the people who have been confirmed by the Senate to serve as the director of national intelligence since the position’s inception in 2005.