Under an emerging deal hashed out between the Pentagon and the director of national intelligence, the country’s top spook might for the first time actually control the thousands of spies and contractors he’s responsible for overseeing. Just follow the money.
You might think the director of national intelligence actually runs the spy world. But that would make too much sense. In fact, as long as there’s been a “community” of spy agencies, the Defense Department has kept the intelligence budget (now totaling $80.1 billion annually) under the military thumb. That’s not really surprising, since the military’s intelligence services — the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, etc. — own the majority of big-ticket intel items like space satellites. But it’s meant that functional control of the intelligence budget isn’t in the hands of the nation’s top spy, despite years’ worth of legislative and bureaucratic fixes to consolidate control of intelligence under a single official.
That could be coming to an end. At a Louisiana conference yesterday, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, announced that he’s reached “at least conceptual agreement” with his old friend, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, to move the National Intelligence Program, the non-operational-military (read: CIA) part of the intel budget, over to his office. That’s $53.1 billion dollars — out of $80 billion — that Clapper or his successor will control by 2013. (The remaining $27 billion, for military intelligence activities, will remain in Pentagon hands.)
The details are still fuzzy, but it sounds like the director can for the first time shift money into spying priorities — and de-fund programs that aren’t working. The intelligence agencies now have to take greater notice of who’s in charge. Just last year, the CIA routed Clapper’s predecessor in a bureaucratic fight over who appointed the top spooks at overseas spying outposts. That’s a lot harder to do when Clapper’s office has influence over the agency’s cash.
Clapper had no problem bragging about the big bureaucratic victory. “That is one specific way to accrue more authority to [my office] in the oversight and execution of that funding,” he told the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation’s annual meeting.
It’s also a shift for Clapper himself. Congress created a director of national intelligence in 2004 to manage the 16 spy services, but didn’t actually write into the law mechanisms for the director to direct his own budget. Lawmakers have come to see that as a mistake, but haven’t fixed it. In his previous job heading up defense intelligence, Clapper didn’t mind the congressional error, preferring for the Pentagon to control the intel money — to the point where the Senate intelligence committee’s leadership initially balked at his nomination to be director.
But the new arrangement isn’t just good for Clapper. It’s in Gates’ interest. The Pentagon chief is trying to cut $100 billion in waste out of the defense budget for five years, an effort he says is necessary to preserving core military functions against future attempts at balancing the federal budget. With the stroke of a pen, $53 billion is no longer Gates’ problem. No wonder Clapper called it “win-win” for the Pentagon and the spy services.
The move also got cautious praise as a transparency measure. Steve Aftergood, an intelligence-policy analyst at the Federation of American Scientists who’s fought for years to shine more sunlight into the intelligence budget, blogged that if Clapper can secure congressional support for the budget shift, he’ll remove “a source of pointless obfuscation, and thereby strengthen oversight and accountability.” That’s a big if, though: Clapper and Gates will need to convince the congressional armed-service panels that they should turn over their authorities over the lion’s share of the intel budget to their colleagues on the intelligence committees.
It’s also not even Clapper’s only big announcement at the conference. At his confirmation hearing, he mused that the spy services had become too dependent on private contractors — the subject of a recent Washington Post expose. In Louisiana, Clapper said he’ll start “smartly” cutting back on contract personnel over a period of years, starting with his own office staff, and he’ll expand the permanent intelligence workforce. Overall, he also pledged to trim the total spy budget — which is double what it was on 9/11. And he’s bringing in Major General Michael Flynn, the author of a harsh critique of intelligence practices in Afghanistan, to make sure spy agencies share information with each other across the federal and state governments.
There are a lot of details that need to be worked out, as the agreement with Gates is still “conceptual.” And already congressional staffers are giving anonymous not-so-fast quotes to the papers. But if Clapper can pull this off, then the country is a step closer to getting the spy agencies on the same page — something that the 9/11 Commission urged in order to prevent another terrorist attack.
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