4 Takeaways From Ratcliffe’s CIA Confirmation Hearing

Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe testifies before a Senate Intelligence Committee on his nomination to be CIA director, on Capitol Hill on Jan. 15, 2025. Jemal Countess/AFP via Getty Images

John Ratcliffe, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for CIA director, told senators Wednesday that he would prioritize meritocracy in the agency, bring the cyber fight to China, and maintain robust intelligence gathering capabilities that have at times been weaponized against Americans.

Ratcliffe, who served as Director of National Intelligence (DNI) during the first Trump administration and previously served as a U.S. House representative for Texas, delivered the remarks to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence during a Jan. 15 hearing to vet his nomination to lead the CIA.

From eliminating what he viewed as needless social justice programs to implementing a strategy for developing offensive cyber weapons, here are four of the key takeaways from Ratcliffe’s testimony:

Putting Merit First

Ratcliffe said he would employ “the ultimate meritocracy” throughout the agency and would seek to remove what he considered a “politically motivated, bureaucratically imposed social justice agenda” that distracts from the agency’s core mission.

That said, Ratcliffe affirmed that the backgrounds and views of the agency’s employees were necessarily diverse and vowed that he would not hire or fire employees based on their political views.

“I will unapologetically empower the most talented, hardest working, and most courageous risk-takers and innovators to protect the American people and advance America’s interests. And I will not tolerate anything or anyone that distracts from our mission,” Ratcliffe said.

“Above all, there will be a strict adherence to the CIA’s mission: We will collect intelligence, especially human intelligence, no matter how dark or difficult.”

Ratcliffe said that “political or personal biases” should not be allowed to cloud the judgment of the agency’s employees or to diminish the quality of its products. Ensuring that, he said, begins with holding members of its community accountable when they failed to deliver on expectations.

Likewise, he added that he would direct the agency to create opportunities for employees to serve on rotations in the private sector to further hone their professional skills.

Focus on Countering China-led Axis

Ratcliffe also underscored that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is increasingly coordinating with Iran, North Korea, and Russia to undermine the United States and to displace it as the world’s foremost superpower.

The threat of that growing axis of adversaries, he said, is further compounded by those powers’ efforts to advance cutting-edge technologies, including the application of artificial intelligence and quantum computing.

He said the CCP understands “who wins the race in the emerging technologies of today will dominate the world of tomorrow.”

“These threats converge at a time of rapid technological change,” Ratcliffe said. Emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and quantum computing will define the future of national security, geopolitical power, and human civilization.”

As such, Ratcliffe pointed to his record as DNI under the first Trump administration, wherein he devoted greater resources to countering the CCP’s malign influence and reorienting the agency to contend with China as the nation’s leading national security threat.

“The Chinese Communist Party remains committed to dominating the world economically, militarily, and technologically,” he said.

Putting Cyber Capabilities on Offense

Ratcliffe said the key to countering the CCP and its partners will be the development of offensive tools to confront and deter cyber security threats posed by adversarial foreign nations.

Calling such threats an “invasion through our digital borders from half a world away,” Ratcliffe said the United States needs to impose greater consequences on nations seeking to violate the integrity of U.S. telecommunications and other digital systems in order to deter future aggression.

The former director of national intelligence also agreed with Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) that developing a cyber deterrent strategy that mirrors systems used in other areas of national defense would be useful.

“Our adversaries… understand that the nations who win the race of emerging technologies of today will dominate the world of tomorrow,” Ratcliffe said.

To that end, he suggested that the CIA would need to develop tools to allow U.S. cybersecurity professionals to “go on offense” against China to deter further major cyberattacks on U.S. infrastructure. He acknowledged that deploying such capabilities would be a policy decision for Congress.

Defending FISA 702, Opposing Wiretap Warrants

Ratcliffe also addressed congressional concerns over the future of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA 702).

That law allows U.S. intelligence agencies to eavesdrop on foreign targets in foreign countries, but Americans or those living in the United States frequently have their own calls and messages intercepted as part of this collection process when communicating with those being surveilled.

This allows intelligence agencies, at times, to query information that reveals constitutionally protected information about American citizens.

The law has come under widespread condemnation for acknowledged abuses, particularly in the FBI, where agents queried the personal information of Americans more than 3.4 million times in 2021 alone.

Ratcliffe noted that the CIA had queried nowhere near that number and stressed that, while some reforms were needed to safeguard civil liberties, FISA 702 provided a trove of national security information that simply could not be acquired by other means.

“Sometimes more than half of the actionable foreign intelligence that we provide to the president as the policy maker to act as commander in chief comes from FISA derived or 702 derived action,” Ratcliffe said.

To that end, Ratcliffe described FISA 702 as an “indispensable national security tool” to detect and thwart emerging threat actors “over there, before they come over here.”

Ratcliffe likewise added that he opposed requiring warrants for queries on Americans’ information because intelligence officials would likely not be able to provide sufficient evidence to obtain warrants at all, much less in time to mitigate emerging threats.