Secrecy News – Intelligence Spending drops for a second year

For the second year in a row and for only the second time in the post-9/11
era, total intelligence spending declined last year to $75.4 billion,
according to figures released yesterday by the Director of National
Intelligence and the Department of Defense.

        http://www.fas.org/irp/budget/index.html

Total spending had peaked in FY2010 at $80.1 billion, and declined in
FY2011 to $78.6 billion.

"We are looking at some pretty steep budget cuts across the board in the
Intelligence Community," DNI James Clapper told the Senate Intelligence
Committee last January.

"Never before has the Intelligence Community been called upon to master
such complexity on so many issues in such a resource-constrained
environment," he said then. "We're rising to the challenge by continuing to
integrate the Intelligence Community, ... taking advantage of new
technologies, implementing new efficiencies, and, as always, simply working
hard. But, candidly, maintaining the world's premier intelligence
enterprise in the face of shrinking budgets will be difficult. We'll be
accepting and managing risk more so than we've had to do in the last
decade."

        http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2012_hr/threat.pdf

But while intelligence budgets are shrinking, they remain very high by
historical standards, having more than doubled over the past decade.

Total intelligence spending is comprised of two budget constructs:  the
National Intelligence Program (NIP) and the Military Intelligence Program
(MIP).  The large defense intelligence agencies -- including NSA, NRO, and
NGA -- receive funding through both budget programs.

For the first time ever in FY2012, both the budget request for the NIP
($55 billion) and the subsequent budget appropriation ($53.9 billion) have
been disclosed.  (The MIP request was disclosed for FY2013, but not for
FY2012.)  This is something of a breakthrough in intelligence
classification policy.

Hypothetically (or so it was long asserted), a hostile intelligence
analyst could derive valuable insight from the gap between each year's
budget appropriation, or between the appropriation and the request, to the
detriment of U.S. security.

"Disclosure of the budget request or the total appropriation reasonably
could be expected to cause damage to the national security in several
ways," wrote Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet in 1999 in a
successful effort to keep the budget secret at that time. "First,
disclosure of the budget request reasonably could be expected to provide
foreign governments with the United States' own assessment of its
intelligence capabilities and weaknesses. The difference between the
appropriation for one year and the Administration's budget request for the
next provides a measure of the Administration's unique, critical assessment
of its own intelligence programs. A requested budget decrease reflects a
decision that existing intelligence programs are more than adequate to meet
the national security needs of the United States. A requested budget
increase reflects a decision that existing intelligence programs are
insufficient to meet our national security needs. A budget request with no
change in spending reflects a decision that existing programs are just
adequate to meet our needs."

        http://www.fas.org/sgp/foia/tenet499.html

But this longstanding official position has now lost any semblance of
cogency.

"In my view, this argument does not stand up to even a few minutes of
serious analysis," wrote former 9/11 Commission executive director (and
Romney campaign adviser) Philip Zelikow in the latest issue of the CIA
journal Studies in Intelligence.

But with serious analysis evidently in short supply, total intelligence
budget secrecy remained the norm for many decades until recently.

_______________________________________________
Secrecy News is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the
Federation of American Scientists.

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_______________________
Steven Aftergood
Project on Government Secrecy
Federation of American Scientists
web:    www.fas.org/sgp/index.html
email:  saftergood@fas.org
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twitter: @saftergood