Intel Budget (Updated)

The office of the Director of National Intelligence announced yesterday it is asking Congress for $55 billion for fiscal year 2012. Want more detail? Unless you have a security clearance, fat chance. According to the DNI statement:

Any and all subsidiary information concerning the National Intelligence Program (NIP) budget, whether the information concerns particular intelligence agencies or particular intelligence programs, will not be disclosed. Beyond the disclosure of the NIP topline figure, there will be no other disclosures of currently classified budget information because such disclosures could harm national security. The only exceptions to the foregoing are for existing unclassified appropriations, primarily for the Intelligence Community Management Account.

UPDATE: Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists had this to say about the DNI budget disclosure on his Secrecy News blog:

The disclosure of the budget request constitutes a new milestone in the “normalization” of intelligence budgeting. It sets the stage for a direct appropriation of intelligence funds, to replace the deliberately misleading practice of concealing intelligence funds within the defense budget.  Doing so would also enable the Pentagon to (accurately) report a smaller total budget figure, a congenial prospect in tight budget times.  (See "Intelligence Budget Disclosure: What Comes Next?", Secrecy News, November 1, 2010.)

The publication of the intelligence budget request is the culmination of many years of contentious debate and litigation on the subject.

Until quite recently, intelligence community leaders firmly opposed disclosure both of the intelligence budget total and of the total budget request.  In response to a 1999 lawsuit brought by the Federation of American Scientists, Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet said that revealing the budget request would damage national security and compromise intelligence methods.

"I have determined that disclosure of the budget request or the total appropriation reasonably could be expected to provide foreign intelligence services with a valuable benchmark for identifying and frustrating United States' intelligence programs," DCI Tenet wrote in a sworn declaration.  The court upheld the classification of the requested information.