Read: Dan Coats spoke truth to Trump. Now he’s out.

The office of director of national intelligence was founded to coordinate intelligence across 16 agencies, after the 9/11 Commission found critical coordination gaps and missed clues that, if heeded, could have stopped the attacks. But it’s always had skeptics who view it as an unnecessary additional layer of bureaucracy, as well as defenders who maintain that its coordination role is still essential and that eliminating the role would once again leave America vulnerable to dangerous missed signals. Trump has reportedly considered eliminating the office altogether. So the next permanent director could serve as the strong advocate the intelligence workforce needs under this president, and a voice of clarity to Congress and the public amid presidential obfuscation—or he could see the position further sidelined, perhaps all the way into oblivion. Not long before handing in her own resignation, Gordon highlighted the key problem. “This is a world where the threats are to and through information,” she told Michael Morell of the Intelligence Matters podcast, citing Russian electoral interference via disinformation to divide and confuse Americans. “I can think of no greater threat to America than actions that would make us not believe in ourselves.”

So how do you serve a president who routinely shares misinformation and misleads the public? And how do you observe the intelligence community’s bounds of secrecy and discretion while keeping the public informed about the real nature of threats—from Russia to North Korea or the Islamic State—that Trump denies or downplays?

“One of the DNI’s main responsibilities in any administration is to ensure the objectivity of intelligence analysis, and intelligence collection, and intelligence in general,” says Morell, who is also a former deputy director of the CIA. This involves both making sure intelligence analysts aren’t spinning their results to please policy makers and making sure policy makers are communicating accurately with the public about what they’re being told.

Read: Trump’s intelligence officials contradict him on Russian meddling

“A big part of the internal piece, which doesn’t get done very well very often, is that when a policy maker mischaracterizes intelligence in a public forum, or in a private forum … that one of your responsibilities is to correct them,” Morell says. “There are ways to do that without embarrassing the president or getting into a public feud, but it’s important the public know the truth.”

Policy makers will often encounter intelligence that conflicts with their political priorities; their aversion to hearing it is a long-standing problem made worse by Trump, Dennis Blair, who served as Obama’s director of national intelligence from 2009 to 2010, told me. "It’s hard to walk down the middle when the politicians want complete support for whatever decision they make, and they regard intelligence as a form not so much of information, [but of] support,” he said.