00:00 – John Sipher
Sure, everything works okay. I don’t know if that will happen or not, but all right, let’s see. I will introduce you, and if we need to change it afterwards, that’s easy to do. Then we’ll just go into questions, if that’s okay.
00:18 – Russ Travers
That sounds good.
00:22 – John Sipher
All right, let’s do that. So today on the Steady State Sentinel we’re joined by Russ Travers, one of the most experienced intelligence and counterintelligence officials of his generation.
Over a career spanning roughly 45 years in the intelligence community, he served in senior roles across the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Joint Staff, the National Intelligence Council, the National Security Council, and the National Counterterrorism Center. He helped build the post‑9/11 counterterrorism architecture. He later served as acting director of the NCTC and in the Biden administration as deputy homeland security advisor. And he also has a new book coming out, Common Sense Take Two, which we’re going to discuss.
Russ has also been a serious writer and critic of the intelligence system. His 1997 essay, “The Coming Intelligence Failure” – written inside the intelligence community’s magazine – warned that dysfunction, budget pressures, and bureaucratic habits could leave the country vulnerable to surprise. He got that right. And he has obviously written on many matters since.
Russ, welcome. Glad to have you here.
01:24 – Russ Travers
Well, it’s great to be with you, John. Thanks very much.
01:27 – John Sipher
So let’s talk a little bit about you, and then we’ll get into the book and what’s going on nowadays. You began your career in Army intelligence in the late 1970s and later served across DIA, the Joint Staff, NSC, NCTC. Looking back, what problem in the national security system kept recurring no matter where you sat?
01:49 – Russ Travers
Well, the system was designed for a world that existed 75 years ago with the National Security Act. I came in as a Soviet military analyst – that was the problem at the time. Very quickly, as a result of the forces of globalization, problems weren’t purely military anymore. They were almost by definition interagency. Department and agency equities were confronted with all problems of any consequence, and we simply weren’t structured for that.
So over the last 20 or so years of my career, I was primarily focused on interagency organizations – whether it was the NIC or NCTC or the National Security Council – because I just very much believe that if we’re going to get this right, we have to do it in a whole‑of‑government fashion. We just don’t do that very well.
02:38 – John Sipher
No, I think sadly that’s true. I mentioned your 1997 piece, written before 9/11, where you argued that the system was so dysfunctional that failure was essentially guaranteed. It turned out to be right. Obviously 9/11 came not long after. What did you see then that others were missing? What were the key things that suggested the warning system wasn’t functioning properly?
03:20 – Russ Travers
Well, honestly, I don’t think it was just me. In the bowels of the intelligence community, there was a pretty widely held perception that we were not on the right track. You remember that this was the time of the “peace dividend.” And rather than address the constellation of organizations and authorities, we just tried to salami‑slice the community. In particular, we focused on dividing the labor – CIA would do political and economic, DIA would do defense, and so forth.
Unfortunately, the world wouldn’t operate that way. Every problem is a combination of political, economic, social, military, and technical. If you don’t have an ability to fuse those issues, we’re going to get it wrong. And we clearly did.
04:07 – John Sipher
Well, thank you for writing that. People should have paid more attention, obviously. But we were more interested in saving money at that time than dealing with systemic problems.
So you spent much of your career on counterterrorism. As you know, Sebastian Gorka just presented the Trump administration’s latest 2026 U.S. counterterrorism strategy – identifying violent left‑wing extremists like Antifa as the critical terrorist threat category, focusing on radically pro‑transgender groups and others. You’ve been working on counterterrorism and remarking on it lately. I think your view is far more complex than the administration’s. How can professionals and practitioners who see the complexity on the ground deal with a system where their leaders don’t want to hear that complexity? What’s your take?
05:17 – Russ Travers
I read the document when it came out and was just shaking my head, as I think virtually all professional counterterrorism individuals are. There is certainly left‑wing terrorism to be dealt with, but to basically ignore right‑wing terrorism, or to essentially dismiss Africa because it’s not “America First” – the notion, again back to my point about globalization, things in Africa don’t stay in Africa, as we’re seeing with Ebola, and we’re going to see with terrorism as well.
Unfortunately, if you’ve got an administration that doesn’t understand the way the world works, we’re going to go through some very difficult times unless and until that perspective changes. And that’s why elections are important.
06:14 – John Sipher
They’re also pulling resources from areas of importance to fit an ideological or partisan view of the world. As you’ve talked about in many of your writings, career civil servants and intelligence practitioners have to deal with the world as it is. If your leaders are telling you “no, it’s this way,” I don’t know how we operate in that post‑truth environment.
06:42 – Russ Travers
I think there has always been – almost by definition – tension between an intelligence community that tries to be impartial and objective and a policy community that comes in with strongly held opinions, be they Democrat or Republican. This one is different, for sure. I’ve never seen the intelligence community just completely dismissed the way this one has. And that’s just extraordinarily dangerous.
07:02 – John Sipher
Yeah, I agree.
So let’s say Congress gets its act together and they’re going to rewrite the national security architecture for the next 25 years. What would you preserve from the post‑9/11 era? What would you dismantle? If serious people came to you and said, “What does the intelligence community need to move forward in this century?” – what would you say?
07:41 – Russ Travers
My own view is that we will be judged by whether we deal well with the downsides of globalization. For me, that means problem sets that transcend the equities of any particular department or agency. So the answer has to be: how do we figure out how to do whole‑of‑government, whole‑of‑society, and when appropriate, whole‑of‑world responses to problems?
So the National Security Council, for me, is a big deal. People like to trash it for micromanaging – that’s not my perspective. I haven’t seen that. Similarly, I thought the National Counterterrorism Center was the right answer to deal with the terrorism problem. John Brennan, when he split it up, said that at some point the U.S. government would take its eye off terrorism because it was no longer the number one priority, and we needed someplace that would be worrying the problem 24/7. Well, I think that’s what happened in 2017–2019. And unfortunately, we cut NCTC because the departments and agencies wanted to preserve resources. I think that was the wrong answer.
If I were king for a day, I would invest in NCTC in a big way. But I would also take a hard look at how this country deals with transnational organized crime – which has far more impact on people’s lives than terrorism ever will. We don’t do it very well. We’re extraordinarily balkanized. So I would have a Transnational Crime Center.
Look at cyber – the notion that appointing a cyber director at the White House level will fix everything is crazy. There are still all kinds of issues between CISA, the FBI, and NSA. How do you work that in a whole‑of‑government way? And most of this effort is actually done in the private sector. So now you’ve got to think about how you bring government and the private sector together. We don’t do that at all. I tried to bring private sector individuals into NCTC, and the lawyers wouldn’t let me do it because we’d be giving an advantage to one sector over another. Okay, it’s a hard problem – but we have to be able to address it.
09:38 – John Sipher
Let’s talk about your book a little bit, and use that to discuss some things happening now. Your book consciously models itself on Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, because you believe we’re at a decisive civil moment. You address the book to the “exhausted majority.” Who exactly are you trying to reach, and what do you hope they do differently after reading it?
10:40 – Russ Travers
When Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense, he wasn’t writing for convinced revolutionaries or confirmed loyalists. He was writing for what historians believe was at least a plurality, if not a majority, of the colonists who were very uncertain about what the future held. They were still British citizens, but they were aggrieved. How did they fix it? Paine, in a sense, catalyzed the revolution by convincing the middle that they needed to engage.
I think we’re at the same point. A public policy group called More in Common coined the phrase “exhausted majority” six or seven years ago. Their polling data showed that about 67% of the American public – neither extreme left nor extreme right – are extraordinarily frustrated with our government. The polarization is maddening. They want the country to work for as many people as it can, as well as it can. And it’s not.
So what I try to do – in a relatively straightforward, non‑academic fashion – is examine the problem set and lay out not only the near‑term Trump problem, but also some of the longer‑term systemic issues we’re going to have to address if we’re going to fix this.
12:13 – John Sipher
In the book, you argue that defeating MAGA or Trumpism is necessary but not sufficient – the problems are systemic and need systemic answers. What are the deeper problems that would remain even after an electoral defeat? You cite the failure of government to do these things. I came from institutional work and thought our institutions took their jobs seriously and did a good job largely. But this attack on the “deep state” – a lot of Americans believe that now. What do we do if, even after a Trump loss, their view is still that institutions are part of the problem?
13:10 – Russ Travers
There’s certainly a lot of good in the civil service. When I got fired the first time, I took issue with the notion of a deep state because that just wasn’t what I had seen over my career. If we go back to the beginning of our careers, that’s about the point when faith in institutions across the population started to decline. It’s been going down for 50 years. Increasingly, Congress is not able to deliver on the problems that Americans are most concerned about.
In a perverse way, Trump was useful in that he shed light on problems that have existed for a very long time. Some of these go back to the challenges of democracy 250 years ago – gerrymandering existed in the early 19th century. We’ve always had a high‑bias, conspiracy‑theory component of our population. Over time, our institutions have come under pressure. A government formed 250 years ago may not be ideal for dealing with the world in the 21st century.
That gets back to your point about the civil service. I believe in it passionately. It’s not perfect, for sure. But most of us are not narcissistic. We took an oath to the Constitution that we believed. We came to work wanting to do good and wanting to do well. That’s not to say there isn’t waste or bad actors, but the civil service has worked. And tremendous damage has been done – 300,000‑odd people have left; millions of person‑years of expertise have left the government. That’s going to come back to haunt us.
So how do you fix that? If you want a functional, reformed civil service, you need Congress. If you need Congress to work, you have to diminish polarization. If you’re going to diminish polarization, that really needs to be done at the state level – because that’s who sends people to Congress. If you want serious people in Congress, you need to deal with electoral reforms at the state level. You need to deal with education of our population. So you pull on one problem and you just uncover all kinds of additional ones. One of the key themes in the book is that this stuff is all interrelated. If we don’t deal with it holistically, we’re going to have a problem.
16:03 – John Sipher
When we talk about the failure of institutions, you mean large institutions like Congress. Because in my view, institutions like the EPA, the CIA, State – if Americans knew about the good work that’s been done – our health is far better, lives are longer, air is cleaner, water is safer. We’ve saved the world from tremendous disasters. In some ways our institutions have worked very well, whereas our political leadership hasn’t – and often uses those institutions as someone to blame. That’s the deep state game, right? “It’s not us, it’s these unelected bureaucrats.” But the unelected bureaucrats have largely done a pretty good job over the last 50 years.
17:08 – Russ Travers
Like you, I worked for eight presidents – four Democrats, four Republicans. It didn’t matter. We were all trying to fulfill whatever the elected administration wanted to do. Some of us are Democrats, some are Republicans, some are independents. It just did not matter.
So you’re quite right, and that’s an important clarification. When I talk about institutions, I mean things like Congress. I do think there are challenges in the executive branch – I would consider our educational system an institution that needs to be fixed. The Supreme Court is a problem in this environment. There are many reforms that need to occur. And the civil service – the Pendleton Act is 100 years old; it probably needs to be updated. But as a general proposition, we absolutely need an impartial civil service to make government work.
18:14 – John Sipher
You mentioned that all these things are interconnected – you can’t fix one without others. For real democratic renewal, there are repairs that need to be made. You talk about civic atrophy. So it sounds like solving these from the top down isn’t necessarily the answer. We actually need things to work from the bottom up – education, civic understanding – so they work in concert. Because you can fix one or two institutions, but it won’t work its way through the whole system.
18:53 – Russ Travers
That is exactly right. A hundred years ago, Dewey and Lippmann debated how things get done in democracies. Lippmann was very much a fan of having a really strong elite that would run the country. Dewey thought we needed really bright, educated people who could inform their leaders. In reality, it’s both. There’s going to be some top‑down for sure – a role for the elite. But if we don’t get the American public – again, the exhausted majority – to care about what’s going on in this country, to engage, and to raise that they can address problems, we’re going to be in a world of hurt.
19:43 – John Sipher
How do you remain optimistic in this era of turbocharged AI, gerrymandering, conspiracy thinking, anti‑intellectualism, economic inequality, declining trust? The book posits an optimistic view – that the policy overreach of this administration, the moral overreach, Christian nationalism, attacks on immigration, militarized politics – you suggest they’re likely to alienate much of the exhausted majority, and that things are likely to get better. I hope you’re right. What’s your take?
20:31 – Russ Travers
I think the polling data is unequivocal that the overreach has caused a substantial portion of the people who voted for Trump to turn away. The polling data suggests that roughly half the Republican Party is MAGA. The other 30–40 million people who voted for him – some are Republicans, a lot are independents who were put off by some of President Biden’s actions. They’re the ones, I think, who fall within the category of the exhausted majority that are turning away from President Trump.
As I say in the book, if he had focused on immigration policy solely on the truly worst of the worst, he would have had the bulk of the American public on board with him. But separating families and mass deportation of individuals who have done absolutely nothing wrong except cross the border – that’s a violation, but they have not committed a crime in the United States. So I do think the elections will be somewhat self‑correcting.
And then, as you say, the key is that’s going to be necessary but not sufficient. What I hope will happen is that people will be interested in taking a hard look at what we need to do to address these issues. It’s going to be much broader than a “Project 2029.” There has to be that kind of focus on the excesses of the Trump administration. But the problems, as we’ve talked, are much, much deeper.
22:18 – Russ Travers (continued)
That gets to a willingness to engage over the long term with systemic problems. The reason I’m optimistic is because I do have faith in the American public. Most Americans are not polarized. Most Americans care about their families and their communities. They want to live in a good country. On the other hand, I can get pretty pessimistic at times because it’s daunting to think about keeping people engaged for the long term, addressing interests that are going to be countered by a lot of money and a lot of power, and technological advances that are occurring much faster than policy and law can keep up with.
Do I think we’re going to have a better life for our kids? I’m not convinced of that. And that’s very sad and discouraging. But you’ve got to have hope.
23:37 – John Sipher
You talk about faith in the public, and I grew up in that system too, wanting to do good. But there is a large subset of Americans who don’t want the things you’re suggesting, and that subset has power and wants to rig the system so that there isn’t a chance for these reforms. How far do you go to fight against what you think is a tyranny? If one side is gerrymandering, then you have to gerrymander? At what point does that solve itself?
24:06 – Russ Travers
For me, Congress is the hinge. If Congress doesn’t work and they’re not reigning in these forces of power and money, then we’re going to have a problem.
24:39 – John Sipher
We’ll wait for that to go away? A large subset of the country doesn’t want this to happen, and they have power, and they want to rig the system so that the people who want reforms don’t get a chance.
25:00 – Russ Travers
For me, Congress is the hinge. We need a Congress that can deal with money in politics – accepting that you can only go so far with Supreme Court decisions. We need a legislature that can deal with proper regulation of AI and technology, a privacy bill of rights, all of those sorts of things, which seem incomprehensible now. That’s a huge worry.
But in order to get the kind of Congress that can do this, you’ve got to send serious legislators to Washington or to state capitals. And now you’re back to that complicated array of forces. You don’t fix that unless you fix the primary systems within the states. And you’re not going to fix the primary situation in the states unless people engage. People aren’t going to engage if they don’t see what’s at stake. So that’s an education issue.
All of these upstream issues from Congress are going to have to be addressed. Only after we see a critical mass of congressional representatives interested in government – not performative policy – can we start working on the really hard issues like healthcare.
26:31 – John Sipher
But don’t you see it going the other way? Just in the last couple of days, primaries have seen what I would consider radical right‑wing Republicans losing to even farther right‑wing people that Trump wants to push. If you’re looking for more sensible people to come into Congress, I don’t see that happening.
One thing some people have talked about: in the massive complexity of our huge country, we have very few legislators. Should we have more congressmen with smaller communities that have real elections around real issues that matter to that community, rather than what we have now – so many congressional districts nationalized, fighting national issues about what Trump wants, when they should be working on what matters to their smaller communities?
27:24 – Russ Travers
Maybe it’s “hope is not a plan,” but I do think you’re going to see a pretty significant recoil in the fall with the midterms. My guess is that the numbers would suggest that the gerrymandered districts on behalf of President Trump are probably not going to carry the day if the Democrats can get their act together. So let’s assume that happens.
Then you have very smart people – Danielle Allen, for example – who have been arguing for an increased size of Congress for a very long time and have worked through how that could happen. You have many different suggestions on ranked‑choice voting and multi‑member districts at the state level. But that’s only going to happen if people bring pressure on their state representatives. These things have to be sequenced properly, but you can at least see a way forward that it can work.
28:22 – John Sipher
But part of the problem is that automatically weakens rural states – like the Electoral College. If you want more congresspeople, that benefits places with larger populations, so rural states will fight against it. And they have unusual power in our system because they have two senators with not much population. I don’t mean to suggest these things can’t be fixed, but there are a lot of challenges in the way.
29:00 – Russ Travers
No question whatsoever. But again, put your faith in the American public. I’ve got relatives in Minnesota and Arkansas – they live in cities and in rural areas. I don’t hear them lambasting their democratic republic. They’re very tied to their way of life, whatever their religious bent or small‑government bent is. They just want things to work.
So if you put your faith in the American public along those lines, then maybe there’s a way forward. If not, I don’t know what the forcing function is.
29:44 – John Sipher
I think part of the problem – at least in my lifetime – is that the news has become more of an entertainment source. It’s become much more partisan. People watch Fox News or other things, and they’re fed a certain view – a view that gets people upset and raged, because it’s entertaining. The same is happening on social media. You sign into things that fit what you want, to keep you worked up. I don’t know how we get out of that. When you and I grew up, there were three channels and they pretty much said the same thing. Now you can find your own little view of the world, and to keep clicks going and make money, they need to keep you angry.
30:25 – Russ Travers
People far smarter than me have dealt with this at length. I do think part of the answer is a focus on local news. When I grew up in the very northern part of New York State, we had the St. Lawrence Plaindealer, which had a bunch of local reporters who focused on what was going on in Canton, New York. There was a way of holding people accountable.
That paper went out of business a few years ago and came back. I think they have one reporter now. There are interesting experiments with public‑private‑nonprofit organizations that are publishing papers – the Texas Tribune led the way. Even ProPublica does wonderful research in partnership with local news to hold local representatives accountable, trace the money, and explain to people what’s going on at the local level. We need people to get out of the constant focus on the national level. Things do percolate up from below.
31:45 – John Sipher
Long‑term effort, but the number of newspapers going out of business every year is astronomical.
I knew I liked you – Upstate New York makes it even clearer. I’m from Upstate New York as well. My father’s from Gouverneur, near Canton. He went to school at Potsdam. I grew up in Cortland, in the Finger Lakes region.
32:06 – Russ Travers
Really? Indeed.
32:14 – John Sipher
So listen, you’ve been generous with your time. Let me pull you back to your experience in the intelligence community. The intelligence community now is dealing with partisan issues pushing down on them – we’ve seen that through the DNI and elsewhere – but they’re also dealing with real serious problems: AI, ubiquitous commercial data, encrypted platforms. I worked overseas trying to run spies. Nowadays the number of cameras, the ability of big data to track what everybody’s doing – open source intelligence is both a challenge and a good thing. But the enormous scale of these things – what does a new intelligence revolution look like? Is it just the same kind of thing but faster, or is there something new?
33:07 – Russ Travers
When I was the acting director of NCTC, I was very much of the view that machine learning and artificial intelligence were an imperative, not a nice‑to‑have, because the amount of information coming in was growing logarithmically. That said, I have tremendous concerns right now about what data we’re bringing in and how we’re using it.
When we started NCTC 20 years ago, there was something called Total Information Awareness being pushed by a guy named John Poindexter at DARPA. He argued that you need a really big haystack to find the next terrorist. His haystack envisioned things like U.S. persons’ medical records. It was completely beyond the pale. Across the political spectrum, he got panned, and TIA was killed.
If you were to go in right now and ask Claude or ChatGPT what the potential invasions of privacy are compared to TIA – it’s night and day. We are surrendering our privacy. If that’s what Americans want to do, that’s fine. From an intelligence community perspective, I think we need to take a really hard look at Executive Order 12333. I worry that the intelligence community, under the rubric of “open source,” could be bringing in commercial telemetry data or ad tech data – which is far more revelatory than FISA ever will be.
Is this what you want our community to do? This is U.S. persons data coming into the intelligence community because it’s collected by a contractor and sold to the government. That’s what you’re seeing now with Maven and Raven and different efforts at DOD and DHS to do targeting overseas. That’s one thing. To track down people in the United States – maybe that’s another. Just really hard questions, as we’ve seen the blurring of foreign and domestic.
For people like you and me who grew up as foreign intelligence officers, we need to be really careful about what we do. I wish that the policy, legal, privacy, operational, and technical equities were being weighed by Congress far more sophisticatedly than they are.
35:36 – John Sipher
I can see why there has always been a problem with sheer amount of data and not enough analysts. The speed of AI – the stuff that’s safe is collected by NSA. They collect more information every day than any human or hundreds of humans could ever look at. If you’re a customer – a general in the field – there’s a quicker way for the system to give you information to operate on. In my time and your time, there have always been policymakers who want to be their own analyst – “cut out the analytic part, just give me the raw data and I’ll make decisions.” I worry that the speed is good – users can now see that NSA material and act on it – but there’s nothing in between saying, “Hey, this doesn’t fit with what we’re seeing elsewhere, or there’s a problem with this data set, or some of this is disinformation.” The analytic cadre is usually that place between collection and policymakers. I worry that policymakers will say, “Stop analyzing stuff – let me make my own decisions.”
37:19 – Russ Travers
I think you’ve basically seen that with the president of the United States, who talked about taking the intelligence community to school because he didn’t agree with the conclusions he was provided in his first administration. Then in the second administration, he tells the DNI to go so far as to fire senior analytic types who were providing information out of step with his views on Venezuela. So your point is very well taken.
37:48 – John Sipher
Painful.
So again, Russ, so glad to have you. You’ve been generous with your time. I encourage people to read the book. Can you tell us a little about what you’re working on now and when the book might be coming out?
38:08 – Russ Travers
I actually thought the book was going to be out this week. I got the final proofs yesterday. It’ll probably be available either next week or the week after. For me, the book is an anchor for the ideas. Lots of people will disagree. I would just hope that we could have an adult conversation about what we want out of our democracy and how we’re going to get there. And then, like forever in this country, reasonable people will differ and will argue. We’re just not having that conversation right now.
38:34 – John Sipher
These are important issues, and thank you for bringing them up with us. I encourage people to follow your writing and read the book when it comes out.
For our listeners, thank you very much. If you like what you’re hearing, please subscribe to the Steady State Sentinel and follow other Steady State content. If you can give us a review on Google, that would be really helpful. Stay informed and keep following the Steady State Sentinel. This is John Sipher.
39:05 – Russ Travers
John, thanks very much.
39:06 – John Sipher
Thank you very much.
The Steady State Sentinel is produced by The Steady State, a community of former national security professionals who spent their careers safeguarding the United States at home and abroad. Today, we continue that mission by staying true to our oaths to defend the Constitution, uphold democracy, and protect national security. Each episode features expert hosts in conversation with accomplished guests whose experience sheds light on the crises and challenges facing the nation.