Intel Outside

Yesterday's Senate Select Intelligence Committee hearing on the nomination of Lt. Gen. James Clapper to become the next director of national intelligence includes a whole bunch of potential talking points for supporters and opponents of the intelligence community. Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, who maintains the Secrecy News blog, in today's post noted Clapper's announcement that the Military Intelligence Program's budget would soon be disclosed for the first time:

The size of the annual budget for the Military Intelligence Program (MIP), which has been classified up to now, will be publicly disclosed, said Gen. James R. Clapper, Jr., the nominee to be the next Director of National Intelligence. He said that he had personally advocated and won approval for release of the budget figure. . . .

Since 2007, the DNI has declassified and disclosed the size of the National Intelligence Program (NIP) at the end of each fiscal year, in response to a legislative requirement. But despite its name, the NIP is not literally the whole "national intelligence program." Rather, it is one of the two budget constructs, along with the MIP, that make up the total U.S. intelligence budget.

Thus, when former DNI Dennis Blair said last September that the total intelligence budget was around $75 billion, he was referring to the sum of the NIP (which was $49.8 billion at that time) plus the MIP.

"I thought, frankly, we were being a bit disingenuous by only releasing or revealing the National Intelligence Program, which is only part of the story," said Gen. Clapper. "And so Secretary Gates has agreed that we could also publicize that (i.e., the MIP budget). I think the American people are entitled to know the totality of the investment we make each year in intelligence."

Aftergood also notes Clapper's willingness to reform the intelligence budget's structure:

Open government advocates believe that intelligence budget disclosure is good public policy and may even be required by the Constitution's statement and account clause. But what makes it potentially interesting to policymakers is that it would permit the intelligence budget to be directly appropriated, rather than being secretly funneled through the Pentagon budget as it is now.

"I would support and I've also been working [on] actually taking the National Intelligence Program out of the DoD budget," said DNI-nominee Gen. James R. Clapper at his confirmation hearing yesterday, "since the original reason for having it embedded in the Department's budget was for classification purposes. Well, if it's going to be publicly revealed, that purpose goes away."

Removing classified NIP funding from the DoD budget would be appealing to the Pentagon since it would make the DoD's total budget appear smaller. "It serves the added advantage of reducing the topline of the DoD budget, which is quite large, as you know, and that's a large amount of money that the Department really has no real jurisdiction over," Gen. Clapper said.

However, the intelligence community wouldn't be the "primary obstacle to such a change," according to Aftergood:

The Senate Intelligence Committee has just weakened an amendment to require annual disclosure of the NIP budget request at the start of the budget process -- which is a prerequisite to an open intelligence budget appropriation -- by making disclosure subject to a presidential waiver.

The original amendment, offered by Senators Feingold, Bond and Wyden, "was intended to make possible a recommendation of the 9/11 Commission to improve congressional oversight by passing a separate intelligence appropriations bill," explained Senator Feingold. But the effort to implement that recommendation "would be seriously complicated by the year-to-year uncertainty of a presidential waiver," he said in the revised markup (pdf) of the FY2010 intelligence authorization act, released yesterday (at p. 76).

Senate Select Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Kit Bond (R-MO) said at the hearing yesterday that there has been "far too many DNI confirmation hearings" in the past few years, adding:

I believe this high turnover rate is a symptom of the inadequate authorities invested in the DNI. If we are unable to address those legislative shortcomings in the remaining time in this Congress, then I hope this is something you and the next ranking Republican will be begin to address next year in the new Congress.