Intelligence reforms risk turf wars

WASHINGTON – A leading congressional voice on intelligence warns that efforts to reform the system to prevent future terrorist attacks are likely to trigger a fractious turf war.

“One of the first things you learn when you’re a chairman is that turf turns to gold and common sense turns irrational,” said Republican Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, who as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is a key player in how the many boxes on Congress’ organization chart are moved or eliminated. “But if you’re going to make changes, it is inevitable that you’re going to move boxes around. Nobody wants to do that. But the status quo is not acceptable.”

Congress is under pressure from the Sept. 11 commission to reform itself and the many intelligence agencies.

Power struggles among the 15 agencies that constitute the intelligence community have been among the reasons cited for the government’s inability to prevent the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Those same battles are reflected on Capitol Hill because so many different committees oversee the intelligence agencies and their budgets. Each could be an obstacle to change.

“Congress is a mirror of the problem,” said Paul Light, an expert on government reform at New York University and a former congressional aide. “Look at the number of hearings we’re holding.”

Indeed, since the Sept. 11 commission released its recommendations last month, 10 committees in the House and Senate have held 22 separate hearings on the issue. Moreover, the commission pointed out in its report that the Department of Homeland Security answers to 88 committees.

“Fix that first, if there has to be a priority,” Republican commission member John Lehman, a former Navy secretary, told the House Government Reform Committee at one hearing.

Any attempt at reform will take place in a heated political atmosphere. Who is best equipped to handle the war on terrorism has become a campaign issue between President Bush and Sen. John Kerry. Roberts hoped to submit a draft bill recently that would reflect the Sept. 11 commission’s ideas. But saying that he had “erred in a fit of exuberance,” he backed off when it became clear that his committee needed more time to consult with various players on Capitol Hill and in the executive branch.

The Sept. 11 panel recommended that Congress create a national director of intelligence to oversee all 15 intelligence agencies, with total authority over their budgets. And the panel said that the intelligence committees should be the sole oversight authorities.

But currently, the bulk of the oversight currently rests not with Roberts’ Intelligence Committee and its House counterpart, but with the Armed Services committees. That’s because 80 percent of the intelligence community’s assets and its $40 billion budget fall under the Defense Department.

The Pentagon controls three large intelligence-gathering agencies: the National Security Agency, which does eavesdropping; the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which does mapping; and the National Reconnaissance Office, which operates spy satellites. “The hardest problem to solve here is who controls the big three national agencies that are in the Pentagon,” said Jeffrey H. Smith, a former general counsel for the CIA. “That’s where the huge money is.”

Roberts thinks it should be the intelligence committees, because they are charged with setting policy and priorities.

“What we don’t need is the most important committee for oversight having the least amount of power,” he said.

Roberts also sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee. But he said that with Armed Services controlling 80 percent of the intelligence budget, the Intelligence Committee of which he is chairman “is subject to their decisions.”

“We can increase and they can cut,” Roberts said. “We can cut and they can increase.”

Final decisions about funding are made by the Senate Appropriations Committee, which Roberts described as “two people and two staffers” – the chairman, the ranking member and their top aides – who “decide where the money goes.”

The solution “is you give more power to the Intelligence Committee,” he said. “You ought to give some budget authority to people who know what they’re doing.”

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, however, recently told the Senate Armed Services Committee that corralling all the intelligence in one place could threaten the military’s ability to receive tactical information quickly.

The committee chairman, Republican Sen. John Warner of Virginia, also has urged caution, as has Rep. Ike Skelton of Missouri, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee.

“I’m concerned that tactical and theater warfare might get bogged down in some sort of bureaucratic decision-making,” Skelton said.

With lukewarm support from the president, Light, the government reform expert, said that the outlook for reform is dim.

“He hasn’t made it a top priority,” Light said. “He’s not pounding the table. Left to its own devices, Congress will equivocate.”

Roberts was not that optimistic, either. Still, he said: “The Kansas farmer never put a seed in the ground if he didn’t think that he’d have a crop.”