F OR DECADES America’s top intelligence official, responsible for assessing and co-ordinating information from the country’s multiple intelligence agencies, was the Director of Central Intelligence, who also headed the CIA . Many had qualms about this arrangement. Running an agency as large and complex as the CIA was a formidable job in its own right; combining it with cross-government information assessment and being the president’s chief intelligence analyst was somewhere between unwieldy and impossible.

Those misgivings grew after the September 11th attacks, and the 9/11 Commission recommended creating a Director of National Intelligence ( DNI ) to head an office focused solely on intelligence co-ordination and reducing bureaucratic barriers to sharing intelligence.

The job is something of a poisoned chalice. It combines tremendous responsibility with scant authority. America has 16 different intelligence agencies (not including the DNI ’s office); the DNI cannot order them to do anything. Except for the CIA , the heads of those agencies all report to other bosses—the defence agencies to the defence secretary, the FBI chief to the attorney-general, and so forth. The DNI ’s task is to give the president honest intelligence assessments, even if they are not what he wants to hear.

Dan Coats did that. He defended the assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, even as Donald Trump publicly accepted Vladimir Putin’s denial. He testified that Islamic State, which Mr Trump claims to have defeated, remains capable of causing harm in Syria. For such sins, his relationship with Mr Trump suffered; he will step down on August 15th.

Mr Trump intends to replace him with John Ratcliffe, a conservative congressman from Texas, who has, in the words of Mike Morell, a former deputy CIA director, “the least national security experience and the most partisan political experience of any previous DNI ”. He was mayor of a small town in Texas for eight years, served briefly as interim US attorney for the Eastern District of Texas (the district’s lead federal prosecutor), and is in his third term in the House of Representatives and first on the Intelligence Committee.

By contrast, Mr Coats spent 24 years in Congress, was ambassador to Germany and nearly became George W. Bush’s defence secretary. His predecessor, James Clapper, ran two intelligence agencies and oversaw four as undersecretary of defence for intelligence. The first DNI , John Negroponte, spent 37 years in the foreign service before serving as America’s first post-Saddam ambassador to Iraq.

But what Mr Ratcliffe lacks in experience he makes up for in devotion to Mr Trump. Mr Ratcliffe falsely accused Robert Mueller, during his congressional testimony, of having exceeded his brief as special counsel. He propounded the conspiracy theory that “there may have been a secret society” of federal agents working against Mr Trump. The New York Times uncovered embellishments to his biography, including one claim that he “arrested 300 illegal aliens in a single day” (prosecutors do not have powers of arrest), and another that he “convicted individuals funnelling money to Hamas” (he did not).

Mr Ratcliffe’s nomination is not assured. Earlier this year Mr Trump tried to nominate two unqualified partisans, Stephen Moore and Herman Cain, to the Federal Reserve’s board of governors; both withdrew their names because they lacked enough congressional support. At least a few Republican senators may similarly quail at handing a difficult, non-partisan job to a lightly qualified politician.

Yet just the floating of Mr Ratcliffe’s name highlights the contempt that Mr Trump has for America’s intelligence services. He says Mr Ratcliffe’s job would be to “rein…in” the intelligence services that have “run amok”, by which he seems to mean that they offered views that displease him. That is worrying; some of America’s greatest foreign-policy debacles have stemmed from politicised intelligence. ■