The ODNI was created to coalesce the entire gamut of intelligence agencies in the US to provide, among other things, goals for intelligence gathering and analysis and to set policy for intelligence sharing with foreign agencies
The U.S. Intelligence Community is composed of the following 18 organizations:
Two independent agencies—the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA);
Nine Department of Defense elements—the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), the National Geospatial- Intelligence Agency (NGA), the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), and intelligence elements of the five DoD services; the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and Space Force.
Seven elements of other departments and agencies—the Department of Energy’s Office of Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence; the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis and U.S. Coast Guard Intelligence; the Department of Justice’s Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Office of National Security Intelligence; the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research; and the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis.
AARO - the office set up to investigate UAP - are within the office of the Secretary of Defense, which is part of the civilian staff of the U.S. Secretary of Defense, which is part of the executive department of the US Armed Forces. So technically AARO and the resources to investigate the phenomena fall within the purview of the ODNI.
Even DNI Avril Haines, and her predecessor John Ratcliffe (who has been on the news lately about the UAP topic too), has commented on UAP and the phenomena, and has made some pretty bold statements in 2021:
n dramatic shift, national intelligence director does not rule out ‘extraterrestrial’ origins for UFOs
Asked about a recent report in which the government admitted that it could not explain 143 out of 144 military encounters with mysterious flying objects – including several which appeared to demonstrate extraordinary technology – director of national intelligence Avril Haines said, “There’s always the question of ‘is there something else that we simply do not understand, that might come extraterrestrially?’”
Haines’s comment is the latest sign that a seismic shift in the government’s official stance on UFOs is underway.
Just a few weeks before Haines’s groundbreaking statement, NASA administrator Bill Nelson made waves by speculating publicly that UFOs might have otherworldly origins. Indeed, after meeting with the naval aviators who encountered objects that appeared to move in ways that defied physics and aerodynamics, Nelson is convinced that the pilots saw something truly extraordinary.
And then also from the same article:
John Ratcliffe, Haines’s predecessor as director of national intelligence, injected eyebrow-raising context to the military’s recent UFO encounters.
According to Ratcliffe, U.S. intelligence analysts have “high confidence” that foreign adversaries – such as China or Russia – are not behind the most extraordinary UFO sightings. In a stark summation of the government’s assessment of the phenomenon, Ratcliffe stated that some UFOs exhibit “technologies that we don’t have and, frankly, that we are not capable of defending against.”
After reading the classified version of the government’s recent UFO report, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) echoed Ratcliffe’s comments, ruling out highly advanced Chinese or Russian aircraft as likely explanations for the mysterious objects. In an interview about the military’s UFO encounters, Romney referred to “technology which is in a whole different sphere than anything we understand.”