The National Intelligence Program received a total appropriation of $50.5 billion in fiscal year 2014, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence disclosed yesterday, as required by law. The Military Intelligence Program was funded at $17.4 billion in FY 2014, the Department of Defense said. Current and past intelligence budget disclosures can be found here.
Marshall Erwin, a former analyst at the Congressional Research Service and the CIA, said that in principle, the intelligence community should be able to “absorb recent cuts quite easily.” But “whether the IC will actually absorb cuts without degrading capabilities is a separate question. While it has the means to do so, thus far decisionmakers have not proven up to the task.” He presented his perspective on trends in intelligence spending in “Doing Way More with Much Less: Intelligence by the Numbers” on the new blog Overt Action.
Overt Action is part of an effort by Erwin and several colleagues “to create a venue for intelligence professionals to more effectively engage in public debate.”
With targeted policy interventions, we can efficiently and effectively support the U.S. innovation economy through the translation of breakthrough scientific research from the lab to the market.
Crowd forecasting methods offer a systematic approach to quantifying the U.S. intelligence community’s uncertainty about the future and predicting the impact of interventions, allowing decision-makers to strategize effectively and allocate resources by outlining risks and tradeoffs in a legible format.
The energy transition underway in the United States continues to present a unique set of opportunities to put Americans back to work through the deployment of new technologies, infrastructure, energy efficiency, and expansion of the electricity system to meet our carbon goals.
The United States has the only proven and scalable tritium production supply chain, but it is largely reserved for nuclear weapons. Excess tritium production capacity should be leveraged to ensure the success of and U.S. leadership in fusion energy.