Also missing? Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, the person who is in charge of the entire U.S. intelligence community, and who is technically Ratcliffe’s superior. When the war began, the White House put out a picture of Gabbard and Vance meeting with a few Cabinet officials in the Situation Room, looking like they’d been sent to the kids’ table at a wedding.Since then, Gabbard has made herself scarce: She was, after all, once an anti-war Democrat who sold T-shirts opposing a conflict with Iran.

Trump is also irritated with her because of her closeness to Joe Kent, the former head of the National Counterterrorism Center; Kent was her chief of staff at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), and he was her pick to run the NCTC. After less than eight months on the job, Kent resigned to protest the war and has since gone public with blistering criticisms of the administration. (Trump reportedly believes that Gabbard was shielding Kent from the White House.) But Gabbard was apparently in poor standing with the administration even before the war began: In early February, she opposed renewing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act; Trump ignored her advice and is pushing Republicans to extend the law.Despite her senior position in the government, Gabbard seems to have little influence—something of a relief to people who, like me, were concerned about her nomination.

For weeks, and especially since Pam Bondi’s firing, the Washington rumor mill has fixated on who in Trump’s Cabinet is next to go, with Gabbard high on many people’s list of best guesses. I contacted ODNI to ask about Gabbard’s recent activities as director; ODNI responded by asking me for more information on this story. When I elaborated, they stopped responding.[Conor Friedersdorf: The lesson of Tulsi Gabbard’s flip-flop]If it’s true that she’s on her way out, her departure won’t matter very much.

She seemed lost in the position from her first day, and she was obviously sidelined when the war began. Not that she hasn’t been busy: Gabbard looks to be spending a fair amount of time investigating U.S. election security rather than engaging in the leadership of the intelligence community. Domestic elections are far beyond the remit of the DNI, but Gabbard claimed that the possibility of foreign interference allowed her to go wandering around election sites in Georgia in late January. (Gabbard told Congress that she’d gone at Trump’s direction; the White House, however, seemed caught by surprise and distanced itself from her field trip to Atlanta.) Gabbard was likely trying to keep her job by showing Trump that she shares his obsession with the 2020 election, but now that he is ensnared in a foolish war of choice, her previous stances on war with Iran matter more than her performative investigations into voting machines.

Gabbard, at this point, appears to have been fully pushed aside and replaced by Ratcliffe as the president’s chief source of intelligence advice.Firing Tulsi Gabbard would almost certainly be a net positive for U.S. national security. She is unqualified for the job in every way, including because she holds political views that should have been red flags for a position with access to sensitive intelligence. (This evaluation, of course, is always subject to the inevitable caveat that Trump, after he tosses one of his subordinates, may well find someone worse.)But her invisibility during America’s biggest war in 20 years raises another question: Does the United States even need a director of national intelligence?

Gabbard’s appointment was full of risk from the start because of her background, but her inconsequential impact on actual matters of policy might be one more reason to downsize the bloated national-security infrastructure put in place during the panic that gripped America after 9/11.The 2001 attacks raised concerns that terrorists were able to slip through the gap between America’s foreign- and domestic-intelligence services. The FBI handles security at home, and the CIA operates overseas—an arrangement that made sense during the Cold War, when counterintelligence was focused on chasing Soviet spies and dealing with organized crime, but was less optimal for stopping mass terror attacks. The agency and the bureau worked together but often did not share information.After some attempts at tinkering with the structure of the CIA, ODN