Operational Security Act of 2025
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Sen. Schumer, Charles E. [D-NY]
ID: S000148
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Bill Summary
Another masterpiece of legislative theater, courtesy of our esteemed Congress. The Operational Security Act of 2025 is a bill that promises to "establish the Office of Security Training and Counterintelligence in the Executive Office of the President" – because what could possibly go wrong with creating another bureaucratic entity?
**Main Purpose & Objectives:** The bill's primary objective is to create an office that will provide advice on security training, counterintelligence, and protection of classified information within the Executive Office of the President. In other words, it's a solution in search of a problem – or rather, a problem created by the very people who are supposed to be solving it.
**Key Provisions & Changes to Existing Law:** The bill establishes an Office of Security Training and Counterintelligence, headed by a Director appointed by the President (because that's always worked out well). The office will be staffed by career security professionals detailed from Federal agencies – because nothing says "efficiency" like adding another layer of bureaucracy. The bill also creates an advisory board composed of four members, each appointed by a different congressional leader, to provide guidance on best practices in security training and counterintelligence.
**Affected Parties & Stakeholders:** The affected parties include the Executive Office of the President, Federal agencies, and – of course – the contractors who will inevitably be hired to "consult" on the new office's operations. The stakeholders are anyone who cares about national security, transparency, or accountability (just kidding, those people don't exist in Washington).
**Potential Impact & Implications:** The potential impact of this bill is a further entrenchment of bureaucratic inefficiency and a continued lack of transparency within the Executive Office of the President. It's a classic case of "security theater" – creating the illusion of security while doing nothing to address the actual problems.
In reality, this bill is likely a response to some perceived threat or scandal (real or imagined) that requires a symbolic solution rather than an actual fix. The creation of another office and advisory board will only serve to further obscure accountability and create more opportunities for waste, abuse, and corruption.
Diagnosis: This bill is suffering from a severe case of "Bureaucratic Creep," a disease characterized by the relentless growth of government agencies and programs despite a lack of evidence supporting their effectiveness. The symptoms include an over-reliance on consultants, a proliferation of redundant offices and advisory boards, and a complete disregard for transparency and accountability.
Treatment: A healthy dose of skepticism, a strong antibiotic to combat bureaucratic creep, and a willingness to actually address the underlying problems rather than just treating the symptoms. But let's be real – that's not going to happen in Washington.
Related Topics
đź’° Campaign Finance Network
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Project 2025 Policy Matches
This bill shows semantic similarity to the following sections of the Project 2025 policy document. Higher similarity scores indicate stronger thematic connections.
Introduction
— 218 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise NATIONAL COUNTERINTELLIGENCE AND SECURITY CENTER (NCSC) The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) has taken a keen inter- est in possibly updating the codified language underpinning much of the nation’s counterintelligence apparatus. “Spy vs. spy” threats continue to exist, but the rise of China and (to an extent) Russia’s machinations move beyond the governmental sphere to technological, economic, supply chain, cyber, academic, state, and local espionage threats at a level our country has never seen. The asymmetric threat includes cyber, nontraditional collection, and issues involving legitimate busi- nesses serving as collection platforms. Barring statutory changes that could occur before 2025, a future conserva- tive President should further empower and resource the IC by executive order or through suggested changes in the Counterintelligence Enhancement Act (CEA) of 2002.32 NCSC was given some authority for outreach efforts on behalf of the IC for counterintelligence education, insider threats, and broader U.S. government best practices, but there remain significant deltas between Title 50 and non–Title 50 entities’ protections. Primary operational elements should remain at the FBI and CIA, with the Bureau and NCSC collaborating on nongovernmental outreach. While there is no need to create a separate agency, a future President and DNI should amplify NCSC’s authorities and roles with respect to counterintelligence strategy, policy, outreach, and governance, including supporting necessary Joint Duty Assignments (JDA) for FBI and CIA personnel. At the same time, the FBI requires significant additional resources and legal authorities to fulfill its statu- tory role as the lead operational counterintelligence agency in dealing with the ever-growing threats posed by our adversaries. The CEA should be updated to include foreign espionage efforts aimed at universities. Corporate America, technology companies, research institutions, and academia must be willing, educated partners in this generational fight to protect our national security interests, economic interests, national sovereignty, and intellectual prop- erty as well as the broader rules-based order—all while avoiding the tendency to cave to the left-wing activists and investors who ignore the China threat and increasingly dominate the corporate world. Reinstitution of the National Security Higher Education Advisory Board and the National Security Business Alliance Council should be prioritized with leadership from the NCSC, the FBI, or a com- bination of both entities. When the CCP steals at least $400 billion–$600 billion in intellectual prop- erty each year, it is time to devote some strategic thinking to exactly how and to what degree counterintelligence efforts can help to protect America’s commercial endeavors. If Chinese strategic technology gains are happening almost entirely in transnational commercial space, for example, and the private sector is also gath- ering and analyzing some critical intelligence, these essential data points should assist in national-level counterintelligence efforts. — 219 — Intelligence Community The NCSC was created in the aftermath of 9/11 as the Terrorist Threat Integra- tion Center (TTIC), which later became the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) pursuant to President George W. Bush’s Executive Order 13354.33 The NCTC was an organization of approximately three dozen detainees from across the U.S. government with a mandate to integrate counterterrorism intelligence and missions, including terrorist screening. Eventually: In November 2014 the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) established NCSC by combining [the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive] with the Center for Security Evaluation, the Special Security Center and the National Insider Threat Task Force, to effectively integrate and align counterintelligence and security mission areas under a single organizational construct. The Director of NCSC serves in support of the DNI’s role as Security Executive Agent (SecEA) to develop, implement, oversee and integrate personnel security initiatives throughout the U.S. Government.34 NCSC has added value in such areas as fusing cross-community intelligence for terrorism watchlisting purposes and improving information sharing while carrying roughly half of the overall cadre for the ODNI. An incoming Administration should focus NCTC on integrative tasks, many of which cannot be carried out elsewhere in the IC, but should not use personnel and resources for redundant analyses that duplicate the work of such other IC entities as the FBI and CIA. ADDITIONAL AREAS FOR REFORM Analytical Integrity. The “tradecraft” of intelligence analysis is mostly a col- lection of lessons learned over decades about what works and does not work in a profession whose high-stakes work is performed by thousands but that also bears little outside scrutiny and provides few metrics by which to gauge success or failure on a regular basis. These lessons have accumulated from: l The perceived misuse of intelligence by consumers as was the case with respect to war-related assessments in the Johnson and Bush Administrations; l Failures such as the failures to warn of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the specific threat of 9/11; l Successes in piecing together tactical and often technical puzzles such as estimates of Iranian nuclear program maturation; and l Strategic victories such as anticipating critical geopolitical developments that have been years in the making.
Introduction
— 218 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise NATIONAL COUNTERINTELLIGENCE AND SECURITY CENTER (NCSC) The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) has taken a keen inter- est in possibly updating the codified language underpinning much of the nation’s counterintelligence apparatus. “Spy vs. spy” threats continue to exist, but the rise of China and (to an extent) Russia’s machinations move beyond the governmental sphere to technological, economic, supply chain, cyber, academic, state, and local espionage threats at a level our country has never seen. The asymmetric threat includes cyber, nontraditional collection, and issues involving legitimate busi- nesses serving as collection platforms. Barring statutory changes that could occur before 2025, a future conserva- tive President should further empower and resource the IC by executive order or through suggested changes in the Counterintelligence Enhancement Act (CEA) of 2002.32 NCSC was given some authority for outreach efforts on behalf of the IC for counterintelligence education, insider threats, and broader U.S. government best practices, but there remain significant deltas between Title 50 and non–Title 50 entities’ protections. Primary operational elements should remain at the FBI and CIA, with the Bureau and NCSC collaborating on nongovernmental outreach. While there is no need to create a separate agency, a future President and DNI should amplify NCSC’s authorities and roles with respect to counterintelligence strategy, policy, outreach, and governance, including supporting necessary Joint Duty Assignments (JDA) for FBI and CIA personnel. At the same time, the FBI requires significant additional resources and legal authorities to fulfill its statu- tory role as the lead operational counterintelligence agency in dealing with the ever-growing threats posed by our adversaries. The CEA should be updated to include foreign espionage efforts aimed at universities. Corporate America, technology companies, research institutions, and academia must be willing, educated partners in this generational fight to protect our national security interests, economic interests, national sovereignty, and intellectual prop- erty as well as the broader rules-based order—all while avoiding the tendency to cave to the left-wing activists and investors who ignore the China threat and increasingly dominate the corporate world. Reinstitution of the National Security Higher Education Advisory Board and the National Security Business Alliance Council should be prioritized with leadership from the NCSC, the FBI, or a com- bination of both entities. When the CCP steals at least $400 billion–$600 billion in intellectual prop- erty each year, it is time to devote some strategic thinking to exactly how and to what degree counterintelligence efforts can help to protect America’s commercial endeavors. If Chinese strategic technology gains are happening almost entirely in transnational commercial space, for example, and the private sector is also gath- ering and analyzing some critical intelligence, these essential data points should assist in national-level counterintelligence efforts.
Introduction
— 219 — Intelligence Community The NCSC was created in the aftermath of 9/11 as the Terrorist Threat Integra- tion Center (TTIC), which later became the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) pursuant to President George W. Bush’s Executive Order 13354.33 The NCTC was an organization of approximately three dozen detainees from across the U.S. government with a mandate to integrate counterterrorism intelligence and missions, including terrorist screening. Eventually: In November 2014 the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) established NCSC by combining [the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive] with the Center for Security Evaluation, the Special Security Center and the National Insider Threat Task Force, to effectively integrate and align counterintelligence and security mission areas under a single organizational construct. The Director of NCSC serves in support of the DNI’s role as Security Executive Agent (SecEA) to develop, implement, oversee and integrate personnel security initiatives throughout the U.S. Government.34 NCSC has added value in such areas as fusing cross-community intelligence for terrorism watchlisting purposes and improving information sharing while carrying roughly half of the overall cadre for the ODNI. An incoming Administration should focus NCTC on integrative tasks, many of which cannot be carried out elsewhere in the IC, but should not use personnel and resources for redundant analyses that duplicate the work of such other IC entities as the FBI and CIA. ADDITIONAL AREAS FOR REFORM Analytical Integrity. The “tradecraft” of intelligence analysis is mostly a col- lection of lessons learned over decades about what works and does not work in a profession whose high-stakes work is performed by thousands but that also bears little outside scrutiny and provides few metrics by which to gauge success or failure on a regular basis. These lessons have accumulated from: l The perceived misuse of intelligence by consumers as was the case with respect to war-related assessments in the Johnson and Bush Administrations; l Failures such as the failures to warn of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the specific threat of 9/11; l Successes in piecing together tactical and often technical puzzles such as estimates of Iranian nuclear program maturation; and l Strategic victories such as anticipating critical geopolitical developments that have been years in the making. — 220 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise Historically, this tradecraft has been passed on in the form of unwritten rules learned on the job and in agency-specific training classes, but increasingly since the intelligence reforms of 2004, they have been codified IC-wide under the direction of the Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Mission Integration. A RAND study of U.S. intelligence tradecraft notes that the “vast majority of intelligence analysts reside outside the Central Intelligence Agency and do work that is tactical, operational, and current.”35 The study goes on to note that the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) has as many analysts as the CIA has and that the National Security Agency (NSA) has several times as many analysts, as does the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), indicating both the breadth of the IC’s technical collection and its emphasis both on developing analysts who can interpret secret human or technical intelligence in quick-turnaround pieces and on countering tactical, asymmetric threats like terrorism. During the Cold War, however, there was a more balanced analytic focus with greater emphasis on strategic intelligence issues as a means of outcompeting the Soviet Union. This kind of analysis deals not only in secrets, but also in myster- ies—making well-founded but ultimately unknowable predictions about future actions by a competitor or adversary. The tradecraft necessary to succeed in stra- tegic analysis requires substantive regional and topical expertise developed over the years to supplement experience in the daily collection and understanding of secrets. Institutionally, it also requires that agencies’ analytic processes be open to discussion, debate, and dissent because analysts must work together to describe a probable range of future outcomes and warn about unproven current threats rather than using the collection to solve a single puzzle with a defin- itive answer. Regarding its mission to follow longer-term issues, the IC is falling short in resourcing and in openness to dissenting opinions, which (if taken seriously) can help responsible officials respond more effectively to threats and threat actors. The IC Analytic Ombudsman has expressed concern that hyperpartisanship “has threatened to undermine the foundations of our Republic, penetrating even into the Intelligence Community.”36 For example, the Ombudsman noted in a report on the IC’s handling of elec- tion-threat analysis in 2020 that, in his view, CIA officials had deliberately downplayed dissenting views and coordination comments expressed by experts at the National Intelligence Council and elsewhere who felt there was evidence of Beijing’s intent to exert at least some influence on the 2020 election as opposed to the consensus view that Beijing did not interfere in U.S. elections. Senior CIA analysts and leaders made it “difficult to have a healthy analytic conversation in a confrontational environment” while violating multiple official IC tradecraft standards. By not allowing dissents or considering alternatives, the CIA exercised “undue influence on intelligence.”37 Subsequent exposure of China-linked online
About These Correlations
Policy matches are calculated using semantic similarity between bill summaries and Project 2025 policy text. A score of 60% or higher indicates meaningful thematic overlap. This does not imply direct causation or intent, but highlights areas where legislation aligns with Project 2025 policy objectives.