Ruger led the American Institute for Economic Research, which has savaged Trump’s tariff policies
A top critic of President Donald Trump’s economic policy agenda has been tapped for a senior post in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
William Ruger, the former president of the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), was named this week to serve as deputy director of national intelligence for mission integration. A longtime affiliate of the Koch political network, Ruger was tapped for the job by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. (Ruger’s ally, Koch network veteran Dan Caldwell who was serving as a senior adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, was placed on leave Tuesday as a part of a leak investigation.)
President Trump and a Secretary Hegseth would be extremely well-served were people like Dan invited into an administration. They’d loyally work to make sure the president’s vision is implemented faithfully and well.
— William Ruger 🇺🇸 (@WillRuger) January 23, 2025
The position puts Ruger in charge of preparing the president’s daily intelligence briefing.
Ruger has been a vocal critic of Trump’s agenda, particularly when it comes to tariffs. During Trump’s first stint in the White House, as Ruger served as vice president of research and policy at the Charles Koch Institute, he argued Trump was taxing workers and making the world more dangerous and less prosperous.
“Tariffs are taxes on consumers, workers, and businesses,” he wrote in a Twitter post in June 2018. “Given what we know about the economics of trade, America First ought to include a robust free trade approach not protectionism,” he wrote in another post that month.
“How is the US going to isolate its largest trading power without harming Americans? What will you tell US farmers about why they can’t sell agricultural products to China? Ditto for other exporters? Or by ‘isolate’ did you mean ‘not isolate but try to seem tough on China’?” Ruger asked in a now-deleted post from December 2019.
“America’s approach to the world just isn’t working to make us safer and more prosperous. And President Trump isn’t helping. We need a more effective and realistic foreign policy,” Ruger wrote in the New York Times in 2018.
The think tank Ruger went on to lead, AIER, has voiced similar criticisms during Trump’s second term.
AEIR has described Trump’s tariffs as a “regressive and harmful” policy and argued that they “do not protect American industries,” rhetoric that could spark conflict with Trump as he and his top advisers rally behind the tariffs.
“Trump continues to claim that tariffs are taxes paid by foreign countries. The reality, however, tells a different story: they’re taxes on Americans,” an AIER article published last month argued.
“The evidence is clear: tariffs do not protect American industries—they weaken them. They inflate prices, stifle competition, and erode international trade relationships,” the article continued.
When Trump floated eliminating income taxes and replacing them with tariffs during the 2024 presidential campaign, AIER published a piece objecting.
“[R]eplacing the current income tax with an aggressive tariff is pure nonsense,” a paper published by AEIR argued. “It makes no sense from a basic public finance perspective. Even attempting to do this would be bad policy and policymakers of all stripes should avoid doing so.”
On April 1, meanwhile, AIER published a piece headlined,”Even Tariff Supporters Say Trump’s Trade War Is a Disaster for Americans.” Trump supporters are “unable to grasp,” that the “costs of tariffs are ultimately borne by American consumers,” AIER noted.
It’s not the first time Gabbard has raised eyebrows with her top staff picks. The DNI, a former Democratic congresswoman and vice chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, originally named Daniel Davis to serve as deputy director of national intelligence for mission integration. Davis was dropped in March after describing U.S. support for Israel’s defensive war in Gaza as a “stain on our character as a nation.”
AIER did not respond to a request for comment.
Ruger praised Trump’s tariffs in a statement, saying the president is “rightly putting Americans first” by “making sure that our trade policies don’t undermine our national security needs while getting tough on countries with unfair trade practices.”
DNI press secretary Olivia Coleman called Ruger “an America First veteran with decades of national security experience who is a great asset to our team” and “supports President Trump’s agenda and is committed to the ODNI mission of providing the President with the most timely, accurate, objective intelligence possible to ensure the safety, security, and freedom of the American people.”
During Trump’s first term, Ruger was selected to serve as ambassador to Afghanistan, but the Senate never took up the nomination—something insiders at the time attributed to his holding views out of step with Trump’s agenda.
“William Ruger has spent decades funneling Charles Koch’s money to NGOs to stop Trump from getting elected, and then to block him on everything from tariffs to China,” one GOP operative said in reaction to Ruger’s appointment. “He ran entire shops against Trump 1 officials on the Middle East. Whoever brought him inside this time knew exactly what they were doing.”
