NSA firings stoke fears of Trump installing a partisan loyalist to lead spy agency
Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images
“We saw it’s possible, without adequate oversight, for our spy agencies to do inappropriate things,” a former senior intelligence official said, referencing the 1970s congressional investigations that revealed many spying abuses against Americans.
President Donald Trump’s firing of National Security Agency Director Gen. Timothy Haugh has fueled experts’ concerns that the president could now use the opening to install a partisan political figure to head the nation’s principal signals intelligence office.
Haugh, a four-star general who served in the role since early last year, was fired late Thursday following the recommendation of far-right activist Laura Loomer, who, earlier that day, met with the president to urge that a handful of staffers in the National Security Council be terminated. The NSA’s deputy director, Wendy Noble, was also fired and reportedly reassigned to a role in the Pentagon.
Loomer, in an X post, argued that Haugh’s affiliation as a Biden administration appointee made him unfit to serve. But Haugh, whose political leanings were never discernable in public forums, was widely viewed as an ideal pick to lead the NSA after its prior director, Gen. Paul Nakasone, retired in February of last year.
Observers say that the move was clearly politically motivated, and it has sparked questions about whether future NSA leadership will maintain the agency’s traditional autonomy or bend more readily to political pressure from the White House.
Historically, NSA and Cyber Command are led by a high-ranking military officer in a dual-hatted role. One former senior intelligence official, who requested anonymity to not exacerbate the situation surrounding Haugh’s firing, feared the move might be used as a basis to split the dual hat, permitting the president to install a loyalist political appointee to solely lead the intelligence agency.
“We saw it’s possible, without adequate oversight, for our spy agencies to do inappropriate things,” said the former official, referring to the 1970s congressional investigations into the intelligence community led by Frank Church and Otis Pike that unearthed myriad spying abuses against Americans, including surveillance and infiltration of civil rights groups.
Among those most shocking finds from the Church Committee was an NSA program that monitored the overseas communications of anti-Vietnam War activists.
“No one, Republican or Democrat, wants to bring back those days or the risk of those days,” the former official said.
Kia Hamadanchy, an American Civil Liberties Union senior counsel whose work focuses on spying authorities granted to the intelligence community, echoed those concerns and said Capitol Hill will have to watch carefully who the president chooses as his new NSA chief.
“Trump doesn’t get to appoint the NSA director in a vacuum,” he told Nextgov/FCW. “It’s not like Congress is completely powerless if he appoints someone unqualified.”
Congressional panels, especially the House and Senate’s respective judiciary and intelligence committees, have played a major role in shaping the breadth and reach of electronic eavesdropping programs employed by U.S. spies. The president’s next nominee to lead the NSA would need to be confirmed in the Senate.
As the surveillance and hacking titan of the U.S. intelligence community, the NSA is a core spy agency whose work contributes to significant portions of the president’s daily security briefings. Leading such an agency should require years of experience in cybersecurity and intelligence analysis, said Denver Riggleman, a former Republican member of Congress who served as an Air Force officer and an NSA contractor.
“There’s a multi-layered, faceted infrastructure that protects American citizens because of the authorities that NSA has,” he said. “And if you put a [political] hack in there, they’re not going to understand how that system works and where the touch points are, where the nuances are … to execute the mission in a way that doesn’t only cost the American taxpayer, but it costs us our very security that we rely on.”
Riggleman said he met Haugh about 10 to 15 years ago, and referred to the fired NSA leader as a “man of such integrity” in the signals intelligence world.
“I think all of us have to be terrified about the prospect that anybody that accepts an appointment for Trump is compromised,” he said.
Haugh was a “superb NSA and U.S. Cyber Command commander who is a well regarded professional and proven cyber warrior. His only fault appears to be that he properly executed the lawful orders of the last Commander in Chief,” said Mark Montgomery, a retired rear admiral who leads the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
“The military has lots of great leaders — but not enough to be firing ones who just happened to serve the previous administration,” he said, adding that no servicemember would want to work for years to reach a top national security position only for their role to become subject to a political litmus test.
On Friday, New Jersey Rep. Josh Gottheimer, the top Democrat on the NSA and cybersecurity panel in the House Intelligence Committee, said in an X post that the “head of the NSA is not a political job and it must stay that way.”
The post included an interview he conducted with CNN, where he said Haugh’s firing was “insane” and that the ousted NSA chief “has never been in a political position.”
“This is someone who is helping protect our country from threats around the world. Especially now, it’s critically important, with what we’re facing in the Middle East, and obviously, against … China, Iran, Russia [and] North Korea,” he said. “You’re talking about a moment where you would not want to destabilize the National Security Agency, and this is exactly what the president has done without any explanation to any of us, except to listen to Laura Loomer.”