President Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor Tulsi Gabbard announced that her office is eliminating the National Intelligence Council’s Strategic Future Group, the group that compiles the public report Global Trends. Gabbard has in the process eliminated this year’s report.
Note: Global Trends, which is compiled by intelligence officers and includes predictions regarding future challenges for the U.S. and the world at large, is released every four years, traditionally in the first months of a new presidential administration. Past reports have warned of climate change, income inequality, and (as seen in the prescient 2017 issue) the risk of a pandemic and the economic disruption it could cause.
Gabbard’s office said the 2025 report “violated professional analytic tradecraft standards in an effort to propagate a political agenda that ran counter to all of the current president’s national security priorities.”
For decades, U.S. intel produced the Global Trends forecast, warning of climate risk, pandemics, and instability. Now DNI Tulsi Gabbard is scrapping the team because the facts clash with the president’s priorities. We’re less safe because a handful of people don’t like the data.
— Karly Kingsley (@karlykingsley) September 26, 2025
Note: At the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, Trump called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion.”
He added: “All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people that have cost their countries fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success. If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.”
Jake Sullivan, the Biden administration’s National Security Adviser, responded to Gabbard’s decision on Wednesday at The New York Times’s Climate Forward conference.
He said that ignoring global issues like climate change would not stop them from posing a threat, and with fewer career professionals in the intelligence community, the United States “is not going to be prepared and as capable to contend” with such challenges in the future.
Sullivan added: “To have the director of national intelligence cast aspersions upon the professionalism and public service of dedicated people, I just find basically offensive and wrong.”
Others commenting on the cancellation of the report struck the same chord as Sullivan, noting the adage that ignoring something does not make it go away.
Numerous X users cited as an analog a famous moment during President Trump’s first term when he said, as the COVID pandemic surged: “If you don’t test, you don’t have any cases…If we stopped testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.”