For decades, U.S. spy chiefs kept their annual budget requests hidden from the public, saying national security would be damaged if the cash figure leaked out. But yesterday, the director of national intelligence released the request for the first time -- and apparently didn't coordinate with the White House.
Feast your eyes and prepare for the sky to fall: James Clapper's first budget for all non-military intelligence (read: CIA) asks Congress for $55 billion. That's an increase from last year's $53.1 billion for the so-called National Intelligence Program. Anti-secrecy crusader Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists heralds the disclosure as "a new milestone in the 'normalization' of intelligence budgeting.
The weird thing about the budget announcement? The White House's budget rollout overlooked it. When releasing a terse summary of its fiscal 2012 request to Congress for intelligence, the Office of Management and Budget wrote: "NIP's budget is classified, so the President's Budget does not publicly disclose funding requests for intelligence activities."
Not that Clapper will tell much more than that. In a press release, his office warns, "Any and all subsidiary information concerning the National Intelligence Program (NIP) budget, whether the information concerns particular intelligence agencies or particular intelligence programs, will not be disclosed." You guessed why: "such disclosures could harm national security."
But don't think that the whole budget for spycraft will be in the ballpark of $55 billion. With military intelligence added in, the total intelligence budget last year was $80.1 billion. In 2009, Clapper's predecessor, Dennis Blair, inadvertently disclosed that the Military Intelligence Program, which had never been previously revealed, amounted to $47.5 billion in 2008.
And Clapper wants control of that budget. Last year, the director said he'd reached "at least conceptual agreement" with Defense Secretary Robert Gates to move the NIP out of the Pentagon budget -- something Aftergood praises as an honest accounting measure for defense cash.
At a House hearing last week, Clapper told lawmakers that he understands "some belt-tightening" is probably in order for the intelligence community, as its budget has nearly doubled since 9/11. Disclosing the NIP budget request may be literally unprecedented. But for a cabinet official to concede that his budget is too big -- now that's really something that never happens.
Photo: Flickr/White House
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