US intelligence sharing has fractured under Trump, report says

US intelligence sharing on Iran and other global threats with Congress and across the federal government has slowed and, in some cases, temporarily stopped during President Donald Trump's second term, according to eight current and former officials and people briefed on the matter.

US intelligence cooperation falters amid Trump-era agency rifts, report says. (Bloomberg)Former officials and outside experts said the disruptions risk leaving policymakers with an incomplete picture of threats facing the country, echoing intelligence failures exposed after the Sept.

11, 2001, al Qaeda attacks. The slowdown comes as the administration weighs whether to resume strikes on Iran after the midterm elections on Tuesday. The problems emerged during Tulsi Gabbard's tenure as director of national intelligence, amid deep tensions between her office and the CIA.

While those tensions have subsided since her resignation in June, problems stemming from the clash persist, according to two US officials familiar with the matter. The CIA has stopped co-authoring assessments with the National Intelligence Council (NIC), an analytical group within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the officials said, reducing the number of reports that pull together the intelligence community's views for decision-makers on subjects including Iran.

Lawmakers and their staffs also briefly stopped receiving intelligence reports from Gabbard's office in the days after the US military intervention in Iran in June 2025 and again after the capture of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January 2026, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Gabbard's team had accused lawmakers of leaking to the press. The disruption in intelligence sharing has not been previously reported. CIA spokesperson Liz Lyons said the CIA "participates fully" in the process of providing intelligence assessments through the Presidential Daily Brief, which is led by ODNI, and through the NIC.

The situation has alarmed former officials, some of whom are working on a bipartisan basis at Stanford University's Hoover Institution to draw up plans to rebuild the intelligence community in the next administration, four former US officials said.

“All of these things are adding up in a really complex world where policymakers need to have a more sophisticated, nuanced, and integrated view of the world, and they are getting less,” said Beth Sanner, a former deputy director of national intelligence during Trump's first term.

The problems inside the intelligence community started last year amid significant cuts to national security agencies, including the ODNI and the CIA, as Trump moved to remove or sideline officials he viewed as disloyal. Some analysts who remain at the intelligence agencies are now careful to not write assessments at odds with White House’s views for fear of political retaliation, two former officials and a current US official said.

The officials did not say which topics the analysts were avoiding. “Analysts still do the work, but this White House has made them irrelevant because the president treats unwelcome information as disloyalty,” said Julia Curlee, a former CIA analyst who said she was fired from the Trump National Security Council last year for being transgender.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment. The situation was worsened by what officials described as one of the biggest turf wars in three decades between two of the most important agencies: the CIA and the ODNI, which was formed in the aftermath of the Sept.

11 attacks. Reuters earlier detailed the dispute between the agencies. The infighting between the agencies — triggered when Gabbard's office revoked the security clearances of current and former intelligence officials a year ago — reached the point where White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles had to intervene several times to defuse tensions, three former officials said.

The National Intelligence Council, which for decades has been a key resource for officials and lawmakers making foreign policy decisions, lost its main author when the CIA stopped writing into the assessments last year. The assessments are meant to consolidate the views of the nation’s 18 intelligence agencies, and the council relied heavily on the CIA for analysis on topics like Iran and Russia.