A newly reported breakdown in intelligence sharing inside the federal government is testing the structures Congress created after the Sept. 11 attacks to force agencies to combine information and keep elected overseers informed.

Reuters reported Tuesday that exchanges among intelligence agencies and with Congress slowed or temporarily stopped at several points during President Donald Trump’s second term. The report, based on interviews with eight current and former officials and people briefed on the matter, described continuing gaps even after some of the sharpest disputes eased.

The new reporting does not establish that intelligence collection itself has stopped, nor does it show that policymakers are entirely cut off. It does raise a narrower policy question with broad consequences: whether the system is still producing the integrated assessments and routine congressional access that federal law assigns to the intelligence community.

A system designed to integrate competing views

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence was created to coordinate a community whose agencies have different missions, authorities and institutional interests. ODNI says its Mission Integration directorate is responsible for creating a consistent view of intelligence, leading the National Intelligence Council and producing the President’s Daily Brief with contributions from across the community.

Congress also gave the National Intelligence Council a specific role. Under federal law, the council must produce national intelligence estimates that include alternative views, evaluate community-wide collection and analysis, and meet the needs of policymakers. That design matters because a coordinated assessment is more than a bundle of separate agency reports. It is meant to expose disagreements, weigh confidence and give decision-makers a common record.

What the new reporting says changed

Reuters reported that the CIA stopped co-authoring some National Intelligence Council assessments after a prolonged dispute with ODNI during former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s tenure. CIA analysts continued sharing intelligence and participating in some work, but the council produced fewer integrated assessments, according to officials cited by the news organization. Five current and former officials said none focused on the Iran war.

The agencies disputed parts of that characterization. A CIA spokesperson told Reuters that the agency participates fully in assessments through the President’s Daily Brief and the council. An ODNI official said council production remained near historic levels and credited current Director Jay Clayton with recognizing its value.

The report also described brief interruptions in intelligence reports to lawmakers after U.S. actions in Iran and Venezuela, an earlier suspension of congressional election-threat briefings that has since ended, and a separate period when the FBI withheld some information from the National Counterterrorism Center during a dispute over authority. Those episodes differ in subject and duration, but together they point to coordination problems at more than one institutional boundary.

The question of congressional briefings is not merely a matter of custom. Title 50 requires the president to keep the House and Senate intelligence committees “fully and currently informed” of U.S. intelligence activities, including significant anticipated activities. The same oversight provision requires Congress to protect classified information through procedures developed with the intelligence director.

That arrangement creates reciprocal duties: the executive branch supplies timely information, while Congress guards sources and methods. Disputes over leaks can lead to investigations and tighter handling procedures, but they do not erase the oversight framework. At the same time, the available public record does not show exactly which reports were delayed, what classification rules applied, or whether every interruption implicated the statute. Those questions would require documentary review by the committees or inspectors general.

The post-9/11 lesson was institutional

The policy stakes are rooted in failures identified a quarter-century ago. The bipartisan congressional joint inquiry into the Sept. 11 attacks found that agencies possessed significant information but often failed to combine, recognize and disseminate it. The inquiry traced those failures to differences in missions, legal authorities and cultures, as well as weak communication among intelligence and law-enforcement bodies.

That history does not mean today’s reported disputes are equivalent to the pre-2001 failures or that a specific threat has been missed. It does explain why integrated analysis is a safeguard in its own right. Fragmented reporting can allow leaders to choose the assessment that best fits a policy preference, while reducing the visibility of dissenting judgments and uncertainty.

What Congress can test next

The intelligence committees have several tools short of restructuring the agencies again. They can compare production data across directors, review whether key assessments included alternative views, question the CIA and ODNI together, and ask inspectors general to examine interruptions in required reporting. Closed briefings can also distinguish ordinary disagreements over analytic tradecraft from barriers that prevent information from moving at all.

Congress has recently shown interest in more formal notification rules. The Senate Intelligence Committee’s fiscal 2027 authorization report proposed notice requirements for material changes in intelligence sharing involving several foreign partners. A comparable emphasis on documented explanations, duration and operational impact could help lawmakers evaluate significant internal disruptions without micromanaging individual assessments.

The immediate record remains incomplete and contested. Reuters’ sources describe a system producing less integrated work and experiencing episodic sharing failures; the CIA and ODNI say core processes continue and some briefings have resumed. The next policy test is whether congressional oversight can establish the scope of the gaps and repair them before a crisis exposes their cost.