The Federal Bureau of Paranoia

The Atlantic

11-07-2025

Working in government, especially in national defense or the intelligence community, can be an unsettling business. You must give up a few of your rights and a lot of your privacy in order to remain a trustworthy public servant. The higher your level of clearance to access sensitive information, the more privacy you cede—and sometimes, as those of us who have been through the process can affirm, you can find yourself with an investigator from your agency's security office, explaining the embarrassing details of your finances or your emotional stability, and even answering some squirm-inducing questions about your love life.
That's part of the job, and federal employees submit to it in order to keep America safe. What isn't part of the job is a McCarthyist political-loyalty requirement, enforced with polygraphs and internal snooping. But FBI Director Kash Patel and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard have apparently decided that hunting down politically unreliable members of America's intelligence and law-enforcement communities is more important than catching enemy spies, terrorists, or bank robbers.
Indeed, to call what Patel and Gabbard are doing 'McCarthyism' is to make too grandiose a comparison. Tail Gunner Joe, a thoroughly reprehensible opportunist, claimed that he was rooting out Communists loyal to Moscow who were hidden in the U.S. government. Patel and Gabbard, meanwhile, don't seem very worried about foreign influences, especially now that President Donald Trump treats the Kremlin like an ally, and they're not looking for enemy agents. They just want to know who's talking smack behind their back.
Gabbard, according to The Washington Post, has 'expressed a desire to gain access to emails and chat logs of the largest U.S. spy agencies with the aim of using artificial intelligence tools to ferret out what the administration deems as efforts to undermine its agenda.' In other words, Gabbard is threatening to endanger the careers of loyal intelligence officers by asking an AI if any of them aren't fully on board with the MAGA cause. She has created a team within her office with the anodyne name of the 'Director's Initiatives Group,' that will collect large amounts of data from across 18 different agencies and run them through AI tools to see if anyone is engaging in 'weaponization' of intelligence. This is a flatly ridiculous, and extremely dangerous, idea.
For one thing, separate agencies rely on separate systems and different levels of classification precisely to keep data compartmentalized and thus to stop an enemy from ever getting all the pieces of any intelligence puzzle all at once. These various agencies limit discussions, even within their own walls, to small groups who are working from shared context and must be able to speak and argue candidly. Each part of the intelligence community shares information with other organizations only as needed in order to bring in more expertise or to gain better insight across agencies.
In other words, the entire system is set up exactly to prevent someone from doing what Gabbard wants to do: gather lots of material from many agencies, dump it all in the same hopper, and then let people (or an AI) trawl through it looking for anything that seems interesting. Perhaps in a national emergency, such as a massive data breach or the discovery of a highly destructive espionage operation, a full-spectrum search might make some sense, especially if it were conducted by experienced professionals who knew what they were looking for. Instead, Gabbard just wants to see if anyone is slagging the president's agenda.
I can almost guarantee that in agencies with thousands of people, someone has written an unwise email expressing bewilderment or disagreement or anger with the president's policies. It happens under every commander in chief; I saw many during my years working for the Defense Department. What does Gabbard intend to do if she finds such emails? Fire some veteran spies and analysts, corrode morale, and potentially create more security risks, just because someone griped about Ukraine or the One Big Beautiful Bill?
Gabbard's efforts, however, look almost noble next to the frantic paranoia that seems to have overtaken the office of FBI Director Kash Patel, who is subjecting FBI personnel to the humiliation of being attached to a lie detector just to see if they've said something bad not about MAGA or Trump, but about him, personally. 'In interviews and polygraph tests,' according to The New York Times, the FBI has asked senior employees whether they have said anything negative about Mr. Patel.' In particular, sources told the Times, Patel wants to know who leaked the director's request to be issued a service weapon, which is not something usually given to personnel who are not trained FBI agents.
Ironically, polygraphs probably won't help Patel much. Polygraph machines, despite the lore, don't really detect lies. They detect stress, which is why honest but nervous people sometimes fail their examinations, while smooth, sociopathic liars pass them. Some agencies routinely require such tests, and their efficacy is debatable. (Their results are not usually admissible as evidence in U.S. courts.) Perhaps in the right hands, they could be one of many tools to root out someone who may be hiding something that could injure American national security. Federal-clearance holders accept their use as routine, if unpleasant.
But to be strapped into a chair that measures your heartbeat and your breathing and other biological data, told that your answers could end your career, and then asked if you've ever said something bad about the boss—well, that's almost certainly going to elicit a stress reaction from just about anyone, even the most above-board agents and personnel.
Patel's snippy anger is likely driven by a suspicion that real FBI agents are laughing at him behind his back. But his solution is more than just egocentric lashing out; it's paranoid authoritarianism. Sending loyalists out to hunt for the regime's critics within the secret services is old-style KGB stuff. All the FBI needs now to complete a scene from, say, The Death of Stalin, is for Patel to run down the hallways shouting, 'I have documents on all of you!'
Gabbard, Patel, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth were always the unholy trinity of utterly unqualified nominees, people put up for their jobs primarily because Trump and his advisers knew that they would be completely pliant and obsequious, that nominating them would horrify official Washington, and that Senate Republicans would have to bend their collective knee by confirming them. But while Gabbard is thumbing through emails and posts, and Patel is examining heart rhythms to see who's been rolling their eyes at him, America is in peril. Real spies are out there trying to steal America's secrets; real terrorists, foreign and domestic, are plotting the deaths of American citizens. Kidnappers, gang members, organized-crime rings—they're all out there waiting to be caught.