Ex-CIA officer tapped to replace Gabbard blasted 'toxic' DEI culture

Jamie Tarabay, Bloomberg News on May 22, 2026

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WASHINGTON — Aaron Lukas, the former CIA officer selected to replace Tulsi Gabbard as spy chief, aligns with some of President Donald Trump’s most ardent beliefs, including that intelligence agencies have become infected with wokeness, and that allegations of a Russian operation to sway the 2016 election are a hoax.

Trump, who announced in a social media post Friday that Lukas would replace Gabbard as director of national intelligence in an acting capacity, praised him as “highly respected.”

In his confirmation hearing to be Gabbard’s deputy last year, Lukas warned that the American intelligence community, which comprises 18 agencies, had become “aimless, bloated, risk-averse, and disconnected at times from the core mission of intelligence.”

He praised Trump and Gabbard for “getting rid of a toxic diversity, equity, and inclusion political dogma that at best was a distraction and at worst pitted IC officers against one another.”

“I will never forget the first chief of station seminar that I attended where the senior-most director of operations, human resources officer, politely informed the attendees that it does not matter how good your operations are in station unless you advance a major DEI reform,” Lukas told the committee.

That claim couldn’t be independently verified. It nonetheless highlighted how Lukas’ opinions are in line with contemporary conservative thinking. Those remarks suggest he will press ahead with Gabbard’s combativeness with Democrats as well as her efforts to discredit the conclusion from the intelligence agencies and bipartisan congressional committees that Russia tried to influence the 2016 election in Trump’s favor.

In that case, “bad actors weaponized intelligence to launch a baseless narrative that undermined President Trump, deceived the American people, and distracted from our critical national security mission,” Lukas wrote in a February tweet.

After working as an analyst at the Cato Institute, Lukas joined the George W. Bush administration in 2002 as chief speechwriter for the Office of U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick. During Trump’s first term, he served on the National Security Council.

Of the rest of his career, he said in Senate testimony that “for the past 20 plus years, I’ve worked as a CIA operations officer in the shadows, never calling attention to my real work, staying away from social media, and being active on the front lines of intelligence.”

More recently, he was chief of staff to Richard Grenell, Trump’s one-time ambassador to Germany, when he served as acting director of national intelligence.

According to the Senate questionnaire, Lukas has made small political donations to the campaigns of various Republican candidates, including Blake Masters, Nick Freitas, Martha McSally and Ricky Gill, who is now the National Security Council’s senior director for South and Central Asia.