Is there any reason not to defund the intelligence community?

Your country's intelligence service protects you from malicious actors.

Defunding them would be as dangerous as defunding your military.

Replace "intelligence community" with "cybersecurity program" at a big company, and you may see it's not so black and white. If your security department is good (especially at prevention), you have few major incidents and people wonder why you need them. But they could also be useless or too big, and your company just doesn't have any major cyber threats.

Maybe (probably) there is room to reduce intelligence budgets, but how and where is not so simple. Unfortunately it's a complex problem that would need study before anything is changed. These populist "defund" ideas sound good but are not the way to go imo

Here's a good article that explains it in detail:

https://irp.fas.org/offdocs/int006.html

Here's page about "OFFICE OF CIVIL LIBERTIES, PRIVACY AND TRANSPARENCY - WHO WE ARE" https://www.dni.gov/index.php/who-we- are/organizations/clpt/clpt-who-we-are

It's so big part of it has the job of keeping the rest of the organization in check.

hope the Intelligence Services in your country are good at seeing the difference between "critics / opponents of the intelligence service" and "enemies of the nation." From their perspective the two are so often similar.