Saying you are in favor of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) is like suggesting you are a Republican in D.C. – the odds against are 20-1 and you are considered either peculiar, dense, or deviant. But, there is a purpose for the DNI. It is needed still. And the sooner former Senator Dan Coats can be cleared for the job, the sooner the Next Generation of DNI can begin.
It is lost in the antiquities now, but the DNI was set up because of two successive, structural intelligence failures on the part of the Intelligence Community – the 9/11 attacks and the lack of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. The Congress, the Bush Administration, and a sizable portion of the public decided the Director of Central Intelligence running both the CIA and the Intelligence Community (IC) was simply not working any more. The Director had enough to do without worrying about budget and program for the entire U.S. Intelligence Community. And they were right.
Make no mistake, the budget of the IC is huge. In excess of $72 billion, it is the third largest discretionary pool of money in the U.S. Government – right below Defense and Veteran Affairs. The budget and program spread across 16 separate government agencies and offices, plus the DNI itself. If it were a corporation, the IC would be the size of Fortune 500 firms, like Johnson and Johnson and Proctor and Gamble.
The major “charges” against the DNI have been ones of bloated staff and mission creep. Under the reign of several DNI’s, it was a benign coordinating body that oversaw from a distance the formation of yearly budgets and commented upon general, “over the horizon trends” in information technology. The last DNI, James Clapper, saw it differently. And, in my opinion, he was right.
DNI Clapper moved to coordinate the vast IC monies and program in an effort to get a handle on overall spending. He also worked closely with the newly created Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence to try to pare back duplication with military intelligence programs. Moreover, Clapper instituted a budget system, which is in lock-step with the Defense Department, that reviews in detail all important budget decisions for years in the future, bringing some form of sensible planning to the process.
And, the DNI has worked to bring information technology (IT) reform to the IC – previously a patchwork pattern of duplicate spending with insufficient understanding of what was available in the private sector market space. In the final analysis, the IC is a first-generation information business that needs to stay up with the times. And the ability to get the best IT to sort and stack the vast amounts of information produced in the 21st century is crucial to an IC increasingly challenged by the capabilities of private industry to collect information and produce analysis
As former Senator Coats moves slowly toward his confirmation, I hope he understands that cutting back the DNI needs to be done prudently. All bureaucracies become too full. That is their nature. However, the DNI’s important work on the IC budget and program controls, and IT sense making are crucial to its success going forward. Let’s hope those crucial functions stay in place.
