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10/02/2005 | Fiscal 2006 Budget: Intelligence Programs

Martin Kady

Every year, there is a multibillion-dollar mystery in the federal budget.

 

In a document filled with thousands of numbers and plenty of convenient charts, the intelligence budget, widely estimated to be about $40 billion, is completely classified. This year is no different, but there is plenty of intrigue about exactly how much money will be given to pay for last year’s intelligence overhaul bill.

According to Appropriations and Intelligence committee aides, there is little new spending in the intelligence budget for the new director of national intelligence, his staff and the other programs created by the intelligence overhaul bill (PL 108-458).

“We don’t think there’s much in there that the intelligence bill recommended,” said one Democratic aide familiar with the budget. “It doesn’t say, ‘We’ve created and funded the new director of national intelligence.’ ”

Behind the scenes within the intelligence community and at the Pentagon, however, there will probably be a fierce battle this year over how much money and how much budget authority each agency has under the new director of national intelligence.

Under the intelligence overhaul law, the director will have considerable say over he budgets of the intelligence agencies.

Currently, the Pentagon, which runs highly technological spy shops such as the National Security Agency, which eavesdrops on communications, and the National Reconnaissance Office, which builds and operates the nation’s spy satellites, and the National Geospatial Intelligence Analysis Agency, which, analyzes satellite photos, claims 80 percent of the intelligence budget.

Intelligence spending is traditionally embedded in the defense budget, where the individual accounts for the CIA, the National Security Agency and the nation’s dozen other intelligence agencies are broken up and secretly tucked into a wide variety of vaguely named defense line items.

One Republican aide familiar with intelligence spending said the new intelligence director structure could be mostly funded by moving around budgets and personnel within the CIA director’s office and would not require a lot of new money.

President Bush has yet to name a new director of national intelligence, and some intelligence sources say the administration is having trouble finding the right person to fill the job. Others say he is waiting for a presidential commission on intelligence to complete its report, which is expected later this month.

The independent commission that investigated the Sept. 11 terrorism attacks had recommended that the total spending for each intelligence agency be made public.

That proposal went nowhere, but the sponsors of the intelligence bill tried to get at least the top line total declassified.

That idea was crushed during last year’s debate by senior appropriators such as Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, who argued that all intelligence spending should be kept secret so that U.S. enemies would have no insight into the government’s intelligence spending priorities. The White House also lobbied against making the total public.

Source: CQ Today

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© 2005 Congressional Quarterly Inc. All Rights Reserved

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