Editors at National Review Online respond to a recent announcement from federal intelligence honcho Tulsi Gabbard.
To Tulsi Gabbard’s announcement that she will slash by nearly half the staff of her agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, we can only say: It’s a start.
From its origin in Washington’s “We must do something” frenzy after almost 3,000 Americans were killed in the 9/11 atrocities, ODNI was a bad idea. To be sure, there was much to the consensus view that government intelligence failure was a major contributor to the vulnerabilities that enabled al-Qaeda’s attacks. For the most part, however, this was explained by self-induced failures driven by domestic law enforcement.
Out of concerns that the government’s foreign-counterintelligence powers (such as monitoring under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) could be abused in criminal investigations, the Clinton-era Justice Department imposed a set of internal restrictions. Infamously known as “the wall,” these directives discouraged the sharing of information between the FBI’s intelligence agents, on the one hand, and criminal investigators and prosecutors, on the other. The result was that key leads regarding the terrorists who’d entered our country were missed, and those terrorists joined the teams of suicide-hijackers that carried out the attacks.
Most of this dysfunction was cured by the dismantling of the wall. Otherwise, it bears recalling that there were already 16 agencies in what’s known as the U.S. intelligence community. To the extent that turf battles and intelligence-sharing across agencies remained challenging, it never made sense that these problems, inherent in bureaucratic sprawl, would be solved by adding yet another bureaucracy.
The initial idea was that ODNI would be a lean agency, whose job was to superintend the intelligence community, such that the right intelligence, generated and analyzed by the CIA and other components, got into the right hands. …
… Naturally, thanks to the empire building of its first director, John Negroponte, ODNI instantly metastasized, with staff growing to twice its projected size and the budget even more than that.
