On June 27, Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR), Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, introduced the Intelligence Community Efficiency and Effectiveness Act, a bill aimed at reforming and streamlining the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). Cotton’s bill is the most important legislation to reform U.S. intelligence in 20 years. It is intended to downsize the ODNI, depoliticize the organization, and return it to its original role of coordinating intelligence agencies rather than producing its own analysis.
Senator Cotton’s proposed reforms are long overdue and align with President Trump’s efforts to drain the U.S. government swamp.
A Bad Idea From the Beginning
The ODNI originated from a recommendation by the 9/11 Commission Report, issued in July 2004. However, it is a far cry from what the commission recommended.
Because of the failure of U.S. intelligence agencies to share critical information before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the final report of the 9/11 Commission recommended creating a new intelligence position, the National Intelligence Director, “to oversee national intelligence centers on specific subjects of interest across the U.S. government and (2) to manage the national intelligence program and oversee the agencies that contribute to it.”
The creation of a National Intelligence Director had nothing to do with the 9/11 commission’s mandate. It reflected an attempt by the commission to capitalize on a crisis to implement a flawed idea that had been repeatedly rejected in the past. Congress made this much worse when it passed the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 (IRTPA), which created both the Director and the Office of National Intelligence. As a result of the IRTPA, the ODNI became the 17th U.S. intelligence agency with a mandate that went considerably beyond what the 9/11 Commission intended.
The 9/11 Commission recommended that the National Intelligence Director’s office have “a relatively small staff of several hundred people, taking the place of the existing community management offices housed at the CIA.” Congress ignored this recommendation and mandated a large bureaucracy for the ODNI, making the DNI the president’s chief intelligence adviser and creating several intelligence centers within the ODNI. Today, according to Senator Cotton, the estimated size of the ODNI staff is between 1,800 and 1,900 employees.
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Author: Ruth King
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