Coordinate the Interagency to Counter Malign Foreign Influence

• The Trump administration should designate a senior member of the National Security Council staff as a coordinator of federal government efforts to counter malign foreign influence.
• This official should coordinate the interagency to ensure that efforts are directed at actual threats, avoid overcorrection, and steer government away from activities that impinge on the First Amendment.
• The new administration should focus efforts on effective foreign agent registration enforcement, protecting U.S. elections from interference, improving cybersecurity across sectors, and exploring the impact of foreign influence on domestic security and public safety.

The assistant to the president for national security affairs (APNSA) in the second Trump administration should designate a senior staff member of the National Security Council (NSC) as a central coordinator of federal government efforts to counter foreign malign influence. The coordinator should work with the intelligence community to present a comprehensive analysis of categories of foreign influence directed against the United States. Based on the current threat environment, efforts should focus primarily on countering the well-known malign foreign influence activities of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Iran, and Russia. The efforts also should ensure that appropriate mitigation activities are focused on countries that are not clearly adversaries nor allies but that engage with the United States across diplomatic and economic sectors and seek to spread their influence in a way that violates U.S. law.¹

The administration should explore possible influence activities of terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah and Hamas in connection with the ongoing hostilities in the Middle East. An NSC official in this designated role would be responsible for coordinating efforts to ensure that counter–foreign influence activities of the federal government are directed at actual threats to U.S. national security, avoid overcorrection, and steer government efforts away from activities that would impinge on First Amendment rights.²

Existing Areas of Focus

As the landscape of foreign influence has evolved over the past eight years, so have the federal government’s efforts to counter it. One line of effort has focused mitigating national security threats based on foreign investment, specifically through reviews from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). This interagency process is led by the Treasury Department. CFIUS review and accompanying divestment or deal blocking is a tool that administrations of both parties have used, with particular emphasis in recent years on transactions that involve sophisticated technologies.³ In November 2024, a new rule took effect regarding CFIUS review of foreign real estate transactions near military installations and bases.⁴

A second line of effort has evolved around the Justice Department’s enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). FARA enforcement has undergone a resurgence in the past eight years.⁵ Prompted by the high-profile prosecutions in the context of investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 election, the Justice Department has increased its enforcement of this statute, which has been in existence for almost a century and is designed specifically to provide public transparency about foreign efforts to influence U.S. public opinion. Under the last two administrations, the Justice Department pursued increasingly aggressive application of FARA compared to enforcement of the act over prior decades, with mixed success in enforcement activities.

A third focus area has been countering foreign influence directed specifically at U.S. elections. The intelligence community and private sector consistently have reported on the threat of foreign influence leading up to and after U.S. presidential elections.⁶ An October 2024 report by the National Intelligence Council (NIC) advised that the PRC, Iran, and Russia would continue efforts to influence U.S. public opinion in the period between the election and Inauguration Day through “information operations, cyber operations, and potentially physical threats or violence.”⁷ These efforts ended up more muted than expected due to the relatively quick vote tabulation and definitive result of the 2024 presidential election. Malign foreign efforts during the 2024 presidential election were directed toward activities that tended to bolster one candidate over the other, depending on the country conducting the activities. The NIC has reported that, since elections were designated as critical infrastructure in 2017, the federal government has observed no indication that foreign adversaries have an ability to manipulate voting systems or otherwise affect the accuracy of vote tabulations.⁸

A fourth area of effort to counter foreign influence has centered on protecting users in the online environment—both from a cybersecurity perspective and by limiting access to foreign-owned social media. The next administration’s Justice Department will inherit the defense against the civil suit brought by TikTok, challenging the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (the so-called TikTok ban), which is scheduled for a January 2025 hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court. Congress passed the law in early 2024 requiring divestment from TikTok’s PRC-based parent, ByteDance, based on the executive branch’s warnings that the algorithm could be manipulated to serve the PRC’s interests in influencing U.S. public opinion and information consumption.⁹

Although Congress established a Foreign Malign Influence Center (FMIC) within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, that center’s activities are limited to designated countries. Moreover, placement in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence limits impact on other agencies.¹⁰ The addition of a senior staff member on the NSC charged with coordinating federal government efforts to counter foreign malign influence would increase the administration’s ability to span agencies and countries not currently overseen by the FMIC.

An Emerging Area of Inquiry

While federal government analysis and attention during the past administration focused significantly on countering malign cyber activities and online influence such as disinformation on social media, the next administration should add to these efforts more specific attention to countering malign foreign activities that may be manifesting in the physical world. Federal government efforts to counter foreign influence should be calibrated to prioritize threats to public safety over vague fears of influencing public opinion. For example, there are indications that some of the current swatting activity (the anonymous and false reporting of potentially dangerous situations to law enforcement) may be originating outside the United States.¹¹ Swatting directed at political leaders of both parties is an increasing problem threatening both the personal safety of the victims and the incentives for being willing to work in public life. Given the current legal framework (or lack thereof), swatting can be difficult to investigate at the state and local levels, particularly in cases of transnational origination.

Additionally, there are indications that malign foreign influence activities may be intruding on domestic speech and protest environments. In May 2024, Hezbollah leader Sheikh Naim Qassem reportedly expressed support for American protestors against the war in Gaza.¹² A pro-Hamas organization reportedly was involved in supporting anti-Israel protests on U.S. campuses in the spring of 2024.¹³ And in 2017, a bipartisan review by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found that Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election included an attempt to prompt conflicting protests in the physical world.¹⁴

The October 2024 NIC report conducted a foreign intelligence assessment of potential foreign involvement in a U.S. domestic security incident and found no indication that foreign actors were involved in the planning or execution of the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.¹⁵ The existence of this assessment is notable, and further analysis should continue to help policymakers understand the existence and/or impact of foreign influence on domestic protest activity.

Continuing federal government efforts to counter malign foreign influence requires coordination across agencies and activities, including (but not limited to) the intelligence community (foreign intelligence reporting), the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (election cybersecurity), the Federal Bureau of Investigations (investigations), and the Treasury Department (foreign investment). These activities can be coordinated more effectively if there is a designated senior official on the NSC staff whose portfolio is specifically designed to coordinate these efforts. Given that the president and the APNSA have wide discretion with the design of the NSC’s organization and staffing, designating this official at the beginning of the new administration is recommended.