Late last month, the question facing the American “intelligence community” — all of the assorted spies and spooks at 18 different agencies — ran roughly as follows: Are things so bad that they can only get better? Or is there another step down?
There was another step down, it turns out, and it is Bill Pulte, whom President Donald Trump has tabbed to replace Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, a position created after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to bring a semblance of coordination to the institutions analyzing the worst threats facing Americans.
Gabbard — who resigned for good and private reasons unrelated to her tenure — had been bad: A colorful but unqualified conspiracy theorist in her political career, as DNI she politicized the spy agencies by sidelining analysts who produced narratives that were inconvenient to the president.
Veterans of the IC worried that blind loyalty to Trump, rather than expertise, was the new standard, and that America’s spies were losing the ability and willingness to speak truth to power, at a potential cost of American lives.
Pulte, though, appears to be worse. He seems even less qualified for the job than Gabbard (who at least had military experience). A scion of one of America’s largest homebuilding empires, PulteGroup, he fell out with his relatives, the family foundation and the group’s other directors and in 2020 left in a huff. He then started a private-equity firm that invests in air conditioners and heaters, an industry adjacent to building which only Trump, as builder-in-chief at the White House, may find relevant. Pulte also dedicated himself to winning the Trump family’s attention and affection, by making its enemies his own.
The president rewarded Pulte by putting him in charge of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which was set up during the financial crisis of 2008 to oversee the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, among other institutions. Normally, the job is, and is meant to be, staid if not boring. Not under Pulte. He made himself chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, axed layers of directors and managers, and turned his office into a bully pulpit in the service of the president.
As part of that effort, Pulte expanded his footprint on X and other social media, where he attacked personal enemies (even family members) in the president’s own rapid-fire, no-holds-barred style. A bit like other sycophants (the influencer Laura Loomer springs to mind), Pulte also went after anybody the president designated as an adversary.
In all these ways, Pulte was just another MAGA crony, notorious among those in the know but obscure to the wider public. That will change if he becomes DNI and wields real power — by whispering into Trump’s ear which domestic politician to investigate or which foreign country to bomb; by influencing decisions of life and death.
Nobody can plausibly argue that Pulte was chosen for any competence in the immensely sensitive and important functions of a DNI. Instead, Mark Warner, the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has it right. Pulte, he says, was “selected precisely because the White House believes he will provide the narrative it wants, not the intelligence we need.” Odds are, Warner thinks, that Pulte will “shape intelligence around the president’s wishes, regardless of the cost to the American people.”