Early last month, President Bush responded to the Sept. 11 Commission recommendations with a modest shuffle of powers that fell far short of what the commission urged. Over the last few weeks, it has become clear that the president’s moves to create a national intelligence director and a national counterterrorism center would not forestall a gathering congressional effort to force far more dramatic changes.
So last week, the White House tried to get ahead of the political steamroller being driven by Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) The president said he would submit a plan to Congress that would create a national intelligence director who has “full budgetary authority.”
The new part is those last three words–and they’re extremely important. An intelligence director without control of money is just a person with a fancy title looking for something to do. It’s good that Bush has come around and is willing to invest the top spy job with real power.
Bush has not fully endorsed all of the Sept. 11 Commission’s wide array of recommendations, as the bill unveiled last week by McCain and Lieberman generally did. But in supporting the creation of a powerful new intelligence post, Bush is close to what the senators propose. Among the differences: Bush would wisely keep the spy post out of the White House, to avoid the appearance that politics could be driving intelligence findings and policy.
Even with that provision, the president’s plan would be a dramatic restructuring of the nation’s spy agencies. Most notably, it appears to siphon away control of billions of dollars from the Defense Department, a move that is still likely to cause an intense political turf battle over the next few weeks. But this nation’s leaders can’t let such internecine battles derail critical reforms.
It’s important to resolve the command structure for intelligence, because there is far more to do beyond that. The government has a massive task ahead of improving the quality of personnel up and down the line, as Sept. 11 Commission members James Thompson and Timothy Roemer argued in an essay in Sunday’s Tribune.
If these reforms are to work, Congress must also reform itself. The Sept. 11 panel was unstinting in its criticism of Congress for creating a profuse and overlapping array of committees and subcommittees that supposedly provide oversight for the various intelligence agencies. It noted, caustically, that leaders of the Department of Homeland Security appear before 88 committees and subcommittees.
That’s all about congressional turf and power, not the most effective way for lawmakers to oversee intelligence. But Congress has zealously guarded these prerogatives for decades, fending off attempts to bring some sanity to the process.
For the sake of national security, Congress cannot continue to defend its arcane fiefdoms while insisting on dramatic change throughout the intelligence community. The McCain-Lieberman bill pushes Congress to streamline, either by creating a single House-Senate joint committee on intelligence or expanding the authority of the separate House and Senate intelligence committees. Either way, this would allow a relatively small group in Congress to develop the expertise to conduct proper oversight of the intelligence agencies. And, unlike today, those lawmakers would be clearly accountable.
That must be done in tandem with the other changes. As the Sept. 11 Commission wrote: “Of all our recommendations, strengthening congressional oversight may be among the most difficult and important.” Congress shouldn’t be allowed to let itself off the hook.
