On May 14, 2025, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard fired Michael Collins (acting chair of the National Intelligence Council) and Maria Langan-Riekhof (NIC vice chair), both career officials with decades of intelligence experience. Their removal came weeks after the NIC produced an assessment that contradicted President Trump's rationale for invoking the Alien Enemies Act against Venezuelan nationals.
The Assessment
The National Intelligence Council concluded that the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua does not take orders from or operate in close coordination with the Maduro government — a finding that represented the consensus of all intelligence agencies except the FBI. Trump and administration officials had asserted the opposite: that the Maduro regime directs Tren de Aragua, which they cited as the basis for declaring the gang an invading force under the Alien Enemies Act.
Circuit Breaker Function
The National Intelligence Council exists to produce the intelligence community's most authoritative assessments — the documents that inform presidential decisions and that presidents are expected to read before acting. Collins and Langan-Riekhof did exactly what their positions required: they produced an honest assessment. They were fired for it.
The message to the remaining intelligence community was explicit: produce assessments that contradict the White House and lose your career. This had direct consequences three months later when DIA Director Kruse was fired for an Iran damage assessment that contradicted Trump's "obliterated" claim — and nine months later when Kent resigned from NCTC rather than endorse the Iran war's justification.
Pattern
The Venezuela analyst firings paralleled the military purge. In both domains, the same mechanism operated: an institutional actor produced an honest assessment → the assessment contradicted the political narrative → the actor was removed. The function being eliminated was not obstruction but accountability — the institutional obligation to put one's name on an honest finding.