Intelligence Bill Centralizes Counterintelligence Power, Bans Specific AI, and Mandates Merit-Based Hiring

This year’s Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2026 is essentially the annual corporate budget and policy handbook for the entire U.S. Intelligence Community (IC). It authorizes the funding needed to keep the lights on and the operations running—though, as usual, the actual dollar amounts for most activities are locked away in a classified schedule, meaning only a handful of people in Congress get to see the full price tag (Title I).

The New Counterintelligence CEO

The biggest structural change here is the creation of the National Counterintelligence Center (NCI Center), effectively consolidating all federal counterintelligence efforts under one roof within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). This new center is led by a Director who will be Presidentially appointed and Senate-confirmed, and they will have the authority to direct other IC elements, access all relevant operational data, and even transfer funds across agencies to support counterintelligence operations (Title III). Think of it like merging several different security departments into one powerful, centralized Chief Security Officer. While the goal is to streamline the fight against foreign spies, this level of centralized power—accessing data and directing operations across the CIA, FBI, and NSA—is a significant concentration of authority that policy watchers will be keeping an eye on.

AI Rules: Maximizing Data and Banning Apps

When it comes to technology, the bill takes a very specific, two-pronged approach to Artificial Intelligence. First, it puts a hard stop on using certain foreign applications. It explicitly prohibits the use of the DeepSeek application (or any successor) on any IC system, including those used by contractors (Title IV). If you’re in a sensitive industry, this reinforces the reality that certain foreign software tools are being flagged as security risks and are off-limits.

Second, the bill pushes the IC to use classified data to train its own AI models. It directs the President to update policies with the explicit goal of “maximizing the amount of data used, especially highly sensitive data,” to refine AI, while still maintaining security (Title IV). This is a high-stakes mandate. They want to use the best, most secret data to build the smartest AI, but if those highly sensitive datasets are compromised during the training process, the fallout could be catastrophic. It’s a classic trade-off between capability and risk.

Fair Play in the Office

For the people working inside the IC, this bill includes several provisions aimed at workforce fairness. The most notable is the prohibition against requiring employees, contractors, or applicants to engage in political or ideological activism to receive a positive personnel action, like a promotion or a good performance review (Title VII). In plain English: your career advancement cannot be tied to whether you toe a specific political or ideological line, unless that activism is genuinely required for an official cover role. This is a clear move to ensure that personnel decisions are based strictly on merit and performance, not on personal politics.

Tightening the Budget and the Leash

Finally, the bill introduces significant new layers of financial oversight, particularly for Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT)—that’s intelligence gathered from publicly or commercially available information (Title VI). The IC spends a ton of money buying commercial data, and this bill mandates that the DNI standardize training, technology, and governance to reduce redundant purchases. For example, Department of Defense intelligence components are now prohibited from buying commercially available information if another DoD component already has it, unless they can prove an exception is necessary (Title V). This is meant to stop agencies from wasting taxpayer money by each buying the same expensive dataset.

Other notable provisions include guaranteeing $514 million for the CIA Retirement and Disability Fund (Title II) and requiring the FBI to notify Congress within five days of starting a counterintelligence assessment or investigation involving a candidate for federal office or a current officeholder (Title V). This enhanced transparency around political investigations is a direct response to past controversies and aims to keep Congress in the loop on high-profile probes.