GOP senators block election security bills after Mueller's warning

"I'm curious, can't intelligence community enact their own agenda if the country is under threat without approval of the senate or president?"

We learned in fairly recent leaks they've been doing this. It just hasn't been easy since they've been apprehensive about revealing too much of their ops to political leadership for fear Trump might overrule them and order them to stand down.

For instance we learned in 2018 midterms they initiated DoS attacks that shut down Russian troll farms on election day. In a separate report we learned that part of the US offensive operation in 2018 included directly targeting Russian trolls by their real, offline names and identities, letting them know they were being watched.

But there is also only so much that can be done with uncooperative political leadership. For instance, federal election voting infrastructure is managed by the states and some states have woefully underfunded and neglected updating their infrastructure or properly securing their voter rolls. Without the federal government mandating security standards and providing funding to get these states to comply, it just doesn't happen. This leaves those states vulnerable and their infrastructure open to attack and manipulation.