Panel urges FBI to take reform steps

WASHINGTON – Pressure on the FBI to reform mounted on Tuesday when House budget negotiators voted to order the bureau to embrace the recommendations of a presidential commission on intelligence failures that would likely erode the FBI’s independence.

The powerful House Appropriations Committee acted a day after a former member of another commission, the bipartisan panel that investigated the attacks of Sept. 11, expressed concern that the FBI had failed to make sufficient progress in recasting itself since the attacks in New York and at the Pentagon.

Tuesday’s action by the normally supportive congressional committee, in language attached to an FBI budget bill, sends a blunt message to the bureau that lawmakers also consider the progress to be unacceptable. It sets up a battle as early as next week, when the House is expected to take up the full Justice Department budget.

The presidential commission on intelligence failures had recommended a restructuring of the FBI under which thousands of FBI employees would suddenly find themselves accountable to an outside agency under the sweeping intelligence reform law Congress approved last year. Without the change, critics assert, only a small fraction of the bureau’s intelligence-related resources would be affected by the new law.

An FBI spokesman declined comment on Tuesday’s action. Director Robert S. Mueller III told a Senate committee last month that the bureau was reviewing the recommendations of the so-called weapons of mass destruction commission, saying the proposals made “a significant contribution to understanding ways we can improve our intelligence capabilities.”

But Mueller and other officials have also strongly defended the steps they have taken to remake the bureau after the Sept. 11 attacks, and were believed to be seeking more time to allow those moves to work before launching a more radical restructuring.