] Senate Intelligence Committee Republicans proposed
] removing the nation's largest intelligence gathering
] operations from the CIA and the Pentagon and putting them
] directly under a new national intelligence director.

(1) I think there's a danger in not having some competition between intelligence sources. After all, our legal system depends on the assumption that it's useful to have some builtin institutional adversity (in that case, between prosecutors and defenders) to discover the trush.

(2) If we are going to centralize intelligence, I might feel more comfortable having the director answer to the Congress, not to a President focused on his reelection.