Early Wednesday morning, Trump said the hearing would be “canceled” until the Senate could confirm the new U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, who would be Clayton’s replacement. In a post, the president said he was derailing the process to press senators to pass his voter-restricting SAVE AMERICA Act.

“It’s regrettable that the president has directed Jay Clayton not to appear at his confirmation hearing today,” said Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., who chairs the intelligence committee. “Mr. Clayton is a patriot and a highly qualified nominee, as the president has said repeatedly. While today’s hearing is now unfortunately postponed, I look forward to proceeding with his confirmation in the near future.”

Republicans were hoping to fast-track confirmation of Clayton to the position after Trump appointed Bill Pulte to serve as DNI in an acting capacity. Clayton has drawn support from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

Democrats warned that Pulte’s role in the president’s mortgage-fraud reviews last year could foreshadow an abuse of intelligence tools to target the president’s political opponents, leading to the historic lapse of a key surveillance authority earlier this month. 

Confirming Clayton would have helped reshore support from key Democrats for the surveillance power. But Trump also defended that the spying authority — Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — should not pass without the concurrent passage of a controversial voter identification bill that doesn’t have enough support in Congress.

“National security cannot be governed by social media post,” said Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the vice chairman of the high chamber’s intelligence committee. “The president’s latest intervention only underscores a simple reality: the biggest obstacle to resolving these issues has not been Senate Democrats or Senate Republicans. It has been the chaos and confusion coming from the White House itself.”

The postponement sets Pulte up to begin as acting DNI starting this Friday. Trump has previously said he wants Pulte to further shrink the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and continue election integrity investigations launched by current spy chief Tulsi Gabbard.

Gabbard is to depart soon. She announced the plans to do so weeks ago, citing her husband’s cancer diagnosis. 

“We're hiring now, and every single new person we hire has to prove some capability of AI and data management,” Navy Rear Adm. Michael Baker said at the Defense One Tech Summit. “Every single new hire has to go through AI and data management training.”

It’s not just the new employees, Baker said: “Every single old hire has to go through AI training and data management so that all of us are operating inside of the reality of what this ecosystem is.”

NGA leaders have grand visions for weaving AI into the agency’s operations. For example, officials are exploring its use for human resources tasks, a move Baker said would take “the burden off of the operator.” (Recently, a deputy director of human development at NGA expressed fears that employees would get so dependent on AI that their skills would atrophy.)

Baker said he uses an AI agent at work.

“And a real ideal is, in the future, that agent is also helping to train me.” Baker said. “We're working together as we go back and forth to think through a problem. That's been the power of, really, this agentic AI, generative capabilities that you can have as you're thinking through things … In the past, maybe you are using the machine to help you understand history. We're moving to the place where I'm using the machine to help me try to predict and understand the future.”

The Navy admiral said AI agents might eventually be used for high-level strategic planning, and said it could be used to navigate the “insatiable requirements that the intelligence community” demands when calculating risk.

Baker said it’s a balancing act when adopting that technology, and said he wants the agency to rapidly innovate but also wants to be mindful of security and avoid “chaos.” 

“That is the complex pace that we're in,” Baker said. “That's a really hard challenge for leaders, but it's a pretty fun space to be in.”

NGA currently has about 14,500 civilian, military and contract employees, according to its website. It’s not clear how many people left in the Trump administration’s rush to reduce intelligence-community headcount by thousands of workers last year. Employment figures for the community’s largest agencies are classified, Reuters has reported.