The Intelligence Community’s Missing Discipline

Economic statecraft has become a primary instrument of US national security, deployed with a frequency and ambition that outpaces the intelligence architecture built to support it. For sanctions, tariffs, investment screening, export controls, and development finance to succeed, the United States must fully leverage the data and intelligence available to it. Now is the time for the IC to organize itself around the discipline of economic and financial intelligence.

The IC has long struggled to prove its value to economic customers: the Secretaries of Treasury, Commerce, Defense, and State, as well as the US Trade Representative and financial regulators. One frequent explanation is the IC’s historic orientation toward military and diplomatic support. Another is the perception that classified economic analysis lacks distinctive value. I spent most of a twenty-three-year intelligence career inside the economic discipline, ultimately leading Treasury’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis (OIA). While this may once have been true, the IC is doing better than ever to meet growing demand.

The problem is no longer the quality of the analysis—which has matured immensely—but the IC’s decentralized approach to serving its economic customers. No IC agency is specifically responsible for the discipline of economic and financial intelligence. The closest is OIA.

Congress created OIA in statute in 2004 with an eye toward sanctions support and countering terrorism finance. Its role has since expanded across economic, financial, and cyber issues for customers across government and industry. However, OIA is not the designated IC lead for US economic statecraft—no IC agency is. One consequence is that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) remains the statutory lead for analytic support to the Treasury-led Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). That made sense in 2007, when the Foreign Investment and National Security Act codified CFIUS and assigned the Director of National Intelligence that role. At the time, OIA was in its infancy and consumed by counterterrorism. That is no longer the case.

The instinct in Washington is to solve a challenge like this by first creating a new organization, then fixing the functions. Congress should start with the functions instead, then address where the discipline sits. To improve IC support to economic statecraft, Congress must first act on six fronts.

Designate a functional manager. One IC element must own economic and financial intelligence as a discipline: collection priorities, analytic standards, a hiring and training pipeline, and a framework for systematic engagement with allies and industry. Nothing about that role requires a new agency.

Clarify authorities. Explicitly authorize collaboration between the designated lead and both its government customers and the private sector, including exchange of expertise and data.

Supercharge private sector engagement. Many of the best national security solutions in economics and finance will come from industry. Create a permanent path for its ideas, expertise, and capabilities.

Work with what exists. Use OIA as the foundation and keep the number of IC agencies flat, but cap its size so it stays nimble as economic statecraft evolves.

Revisit ODNI’s CFIUS role. IC support to CFIUS sits with ODNI because in 2007 no one else could carry it. Whether it should move depends on where the discipline lands, but Congress should not view the 2007 answer as permanent.

Fund it as a national mission. Economic intelligence should not have to compete for a share of a domestic department’s topline. Give the discipline a dedicated budget line, with the investment in people and AI that exploiting economic data at scale requires.

That leaves where the discipline sits—and there are three answers, not one.

The easiest first step is a designation: name OIA the functional manager, leave it in Treasury, and make clear in statute and to policy customers that OIA is the center of gravity for economic and financial intelligence. That is available now and beats the status quo. Nevertheless, an IC office answering to the Secretary of the Treasury will always be seen—correctly—as Treasury’s first. This is why Commerce and others periodically press for shops of their own, an outcome that grows the IC rather than optimizing it.

The achievable reform is bureau status. Treasury did this with FinCEN in 2002, and FinCEN is now treated as a government-wide and international resource rather than Treasury’s alone. Done properly it means a separate appropriation, a director accountable to both the Secretary and the DNI, and a statutory mission naming service to the whole government, the private sector, and our allies.

The stretch option is to elevate OIA to become an independent National Geo-Economic Intelligence Agency—still my own preference, because only independence settles the question of whose intelligence office it is. But where the discipline sits is the last decision, not the first. Under any of the three, the proximity OIA has built with Treasury policymakers is a design problem with a known solution: dedicated, co-located teams at each major customer department.

Economic intelligence is a core national security capability and should be organized and resourced like one: purpose-built to track, anticipate, and disrupt adversary financial and commercial threats in real time. The playbook has changed. Our competitors are more agile, emboldened, and shaping markets and supply chains to their advantage while we debate whether the threat qualifies as strategic.

All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the U.S. Government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U.S. Government authentication of information or endorsement of the author's views.

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