Now that annual disclosure of the intelligence budget total has become routine, some legislators are seeking more transparency on intelligence spending.

As anticipated, the requested U.S. intelligence budget for Fiscal Year 2015 that was submitted to Congress this week fell below the current year’s level and continued a decline from the post-9/11 high that it reached in FY 2010.

The “base” funding request for the National Intelligence Program (NIP) for FY 2015 was $45.6 billion, while the base funding request for the Military Intelligence Program (MIP) was $13.3 billion. (“Base” funding does not include funding for “overseas contingency operations,” which is to be requested later in the year.)

By comparison, the base funding request for the NIP in FY 2014 was $48.2 billion, and the base funding request for the MIP was $14.6 billion. Additional data on intelligence budget appropriations can be found here.

An unclassified summary of the FY 2015 National Intelligence Program budget request (that was included in the overall budget request) implied that the publication of the request was a voluntary act of transparency.

“Reflecting the Administration’s commitment to transparency and open government, the Budget continues the practice begun in the 2012 Budget of disclosing the President’s aggregate funding request for the NIP,” the summary said.

In fact, however, the publication of the NIP budget request is required by law, since it was included in the FY 2010 Intelligence Authorization Act by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (Public Law 111-259, section 601). An ODNI news release on the budget request correctly cited the legal requirement to publicly disclose the budget request figure.

On the other hand, there is no corresponding legal requirement for the Department of Defense to publish the budget request for the Military Intelligence Program. But DoD has done so voluntarily since 2012, a move that represents a genuine reduction in official secrecy by the Obama Administration.

Even so, dozens of Congressmen say that there is still too much secrecy in intelligence spending. The Intelligence Budget Transparency Act of 2014 (HR 3855), introduced by Rep. Cynthia M. Lummis (R-WY), would require disclosure of the total budget of each of the individual 16 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community.

“Writing checks without any idea of where the money is going is bad policy,” said Rep. Lummis in a January 14, 2014 release. “Disclosing the top-line budgets of each of our intelligence agencies promotes basic accountability among the agencies charged with protecting Americans without compromising our national security interests.”

“The top-line intelligence budgets for America’s 16 intelligence agencies are unknown to the American taxpayer and largely unknown to the Members of Congress who represent them,” added Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT), a co-sponsor of the bill. “It’s led to dubious policies, wasted money and questionable effectiveness. Requiring the public disclosure of top-line intelligence spending is an essential first step in assuring that our taxpayers and our national security interests are well served.”

Interestingly, the bill’s 59 congressional co-sponsors include a roughly equal number of Republicans and Democrats. Republican legislators have not previously been known to favor disclosure of individual agency intelligence budgets, with the exception of the late Sen. Arlen Specter, a former chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who once advocated release of the NRO budget total.

A February 12 letter to President Obama asking him to release the individual agency budget figures was signed by 62 members of Congress.

Many of the classified portions of the new Department of Defense budget request were tabulated in “Read the Pentagon’s $59 Billion ‘Black Budget'” by Brandy Zadrozny, The Daily Beast, March 6.

New or updated reports from the Congressional Research Service that Congress has withheld from online public access include the following.

Russian Political, Economic, and Security Issues and U.S. Interests, March 5, 2014

China Naval Modernization: Implications for U.S. Navy Capabilities — Background and Issues for Congress, February 28, 2014

Direct Overt U.S. Aid Appropriations for and Military Reimbursements to Pakistan, FY2002-FY2015, March 6, 2014

Venezuela: Background and U.S. Relations, February 28, 2014

Israel: Background and U.S. Relations, February 28, 2014

Army Drawdown and Restructuring: Background and Issues for Congress, February 28, 2014

Terrorism Risk Insurance: Issue Analysis and Overview of Current Program, March 4, 2014

Federal Minimum Wage, Tax-Transfer Earnings Supplements, and Poverty, February 28, 2014

U.S. Farm Income, February 28, 2014

Prevalence of Mental Illness in the United States: Data Sources and Estimates, February 28, 2014

Early Release for Federal Inmates: Fact Sheet, February 3, 2014

Could Congress legally compel the executive branch to disclose classified opinions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court?  Maybe not, a new analysis from the Congressional Research Service concludes.

The CRS report — entitled “Disclosure of FISA Court Opinions: Select Legal Issues” — has little to do with FISA Court opinions in particular. It is an analysis of the overlapping authorities of the three branches of government to classify or disclose national security information.

“The central issue is the extent to which Congress may regulate control over access to national security information, including mandating that the executive branch disclose specific materials — a question not definitively resolved by the courts,” the report says.

This is not a new question, but it is usefully reviewed and summarized by the CRS report.

The issue arises because “The executive branch has argued that the Commander-in-Chief clause bestows the President with independent power to control access to national security information. As such, according to this line of reasoning, Congress’s generally broad ability to require disclosure of agency documents may be constrained when it implicates national security.”

Although no statute regulating classification has ever been ruled unconstitutional, “Congress’s power to compel the release of information held by the executive branch might have limits,” CRS said. “There may be a limited sphere of information that courts will protect from public disclosure,” just as they have exempted properly classified information in FOIA cases, and state secrets in other cases.

The unsurprising bottom line is that “proposals that allow the executive branch to first redact information from FISA opinions before public release appear to be on firm constitutional ground.” However, the CRS report said, “a proposal that mandated all past FISA opinions be released in their entirety — without any redactions by the executive branch — might raise a separation of powers issue.”

All of this may seem academic and politically inapt since there are no active proposals in Congress to compel public release of FISA court opinions that are completely unreviewed or unredacted.

In fact, Congress has arguably been derelict in failing to press more assertively for release of legal rulings of the FISA court, and for disclosure of the general contours of the telephony bulk collection program. Had Congress forcefully required the publication of such information, much of the angst and turmoil of the past nine months that resulted from the Snowden disclosures might have been avoided.

The new CRS report has a couple of other noteworthy omissions.

It does not mention the authority claimed by the congressional intelligence committees to publicly disclose classified information without executive branch approval. (See Section 8 of Senate Resolution 400 of the 94th Congress, 1976.)  Though this authority has never yet been exercised, it remains available in principle.

The report also does not mention some recent instances when Congress has successfully compelled executive branch declassification while also navigating around potential constitutional obstacles.

So, for example, the Senate Intelligence Committee enacted a requirement in the FY 2010 Intelligence Authorization Act (Section 601) that the executive branch must disclose the annual budget request for the National Intelligence Program when the annual budget is submitted. Previously, the intelligence budget request had always been classified information. To save constitutional appearances and assuage the concerns of executive branch lawyers, the Act did include a provision for the President to waive the requirement on national security grounds — but he has never yet done so.

Last week, the Electronic Privacy and Information Center obtained copies of declassified Justice Department reports on the use of pen registers and trap and trace devices under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act from 2000 to 2013.

New and updated reports from the Congressional Research Service that Congress has withheld from online public distribution include the following.

Drought in the United States: Causes and Current Understanding, February 26, 2014

The 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) and Defense Strategy: Issues for Congress, February 24, 2014

FY2014 National Defense Authorization Act: Selected Military Personnel Issues, February 24, 2014

Navy Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) Program: Background and Issues for Congress, February 25, 2014

Critical Infrastructures: Background, Policy and Implementation, February 21, 2014

EU-U.S. Economic Ties: Framework, Scope, and Magnitude, February 21, 2014

Syria: Overview of the Humanitarian Response, February 25, 2014

Democratic Republic of Congo: Background and U.S. Policy, February 24, 2014

Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) Negotiations, February 4, 2014

Free Trade Agreements: Impact on U.S. Trade and Implications for U.S. Trade Policy, February 26, 2014

The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the agency that builds and operates U.S. intelligence satellites, frequently makes mistakes when it classifies national security information, according to an assessment performed last year by the NRO Inspector General.

“From the classified documents we reviewed at NRO headquarters, 114 of 134 documents contained classification errors,” the IG report said.

Agency classification officials “lack sufficient knowledge of classification principles and procedures necessary to perform their duties,” the NRO Inspector General found. “One OCA [original classification authority] had almost no knowledge of his responsibilities.”

“Because of the lack of full compliance in multiple areas, the NRO is susceptible to the risk of persistent misclassification,” the IG said.

The IG report was performed in response to the “Reducing Over-Classification Act of 2010,” which required the Inspectors General of all agencies that classify information to evaluate their classification programs. A copy of the report was obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the GovernmentAttic.org web site.

Most of the classification errors discovered by the Inspector General are administrative rather than substantive. Like other IG evaluations conducted under the Reducing Over-Classification Act, the NRO Inspector General review does not allow for the possibility that an agency could be in full compliance with classification rules and nevertheless be overclassifying information.

Instead, the IGs have focused on errors in marking documents, failures to specify proper authorities or to cite responsible officials, and similar defects in conformity with established rules.

Still, these are not necessarily trivial failures. Between 2005 and 2012, for example, NRO improperly exempted records from automatic declassification at 25 years when it had no authority to do so, the IG said.

The Inspector General reviewed NRO classification guides (which dictate the classification levels of particular items of information) “and we found that all but one of the 62 guides had classification errors.”

Puzzlingly, the Inspector General also reported that NRO “has not conducted timely reviews [of] its security classification guides” and that “three of the 62 SCGs had not been reviewed within five years.”

This finding appears to be inconsistent with a 2012 NRO report which affirmed that all of its security classification guides — of which there were 67, not 62 — had been reviewed in response to the Fundamental Classification Guidance Review. An explanation of the inconsistency was not immediately available.

NRO officials “non-concurred” with the findings and conclusions of the Inspector General report.

The report contains “numerous sensationalized, exaggerated and misleading statements,” wrote A. Jamieson Burnett, the director of the NRO Office of Security and Counterintelligence.

Other previously disclosed IG reports issued in response to the Reducing Over-Classification Act addressed classification programs in the Department of Defense, Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, and the Environmental Protection Administration.

Perhaps the biggest incentive for reducing overclassification is the negative impact that unnecessary secrecy can have on government operations.

“A major impediment to operating with international partners is the U.S. tendency to classify information, complicating the crucial flow of important data to our allies as well as within and among our own Services,” according to a new article in Joint Force Quarterly, which is published by National Defense University for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“The U.S. military needs to […] try harder to communicate in the unclassified domain,” wrote Jeffrey M. Shaw in his article “Putting ‘A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Sea Power’ to Work,” Joint Force Quarterly, January 2014.

A major new report from the Congressional Research Service examines the infrastructure for producing the plutonium “pits” that are used in US nuclear weapons, and the feasibility of sharply increasing the rate of pit production.

The CRS report does not deal with whether or why that is a sensible goal, but instead probes deeply into how it could possibly be achieved.

“The Department of Defense states that it needs the Department of Energy, which maintains U.S. nuclear weapons, to produce 50-80 ppy [pits per year] by 2030. While some argue that few if any new pits are needed, at least for decades, this report focuses on options to reach 80 ppy.”

In recent years, U.S. pit production has not exceeded 11 pits per year.

“The current infrastructure cannot produce pits at the capacity DOD requires, and many efforts stretching back to the late 1980s to produce pits have been canceled or have otherwise foundered.”

Based on a close examination of the nation’s nuclear weapons infrastructure, the CRS report presents a dozen options that might satisfy the proposed requirements with minimal new construction, by assigning various functions to existing buildings and facilities. It also notes the structural, political and bureaucratic obstacles to achieving any such outcome.

“Of all the problems facing the nuclear weapons program and nuclear weapons complex over the past several decades, few, if any, have been as vexing as pit production,” the CRS report states.

A copy of the report was obtained by Secrecy News. See U.S. Nuclear Weapon “Pit” Production Options for Congress, February 21, 2014.

The final, climactic step in the declassification of government records is not the formal removal of classification markings or even the transfer of the declassified documents to public archives. The culmination of the declassification process is when the records are finally examined by an interested reader and their contents are absorbed into the body of public knowledge.

The records themselves are mute. It is the reader who interprets them, assigns them their significance, and thereby adds value to them.

Declassification of government records can be a tedious bureaucratic process.  But at its most successful, it can also be an electrifying, revelatory source of fundamental new insights.

So, for example, “The declassification of imagery from CORONA and subsequent intelligence satellite programs has inspired a revolution in landscape archaeology in the Near East,” wrote Harvard archaeologist Jason Ur in a book chapter last year.

Support for archaeological research was never intended or imagined by those who built or operated Cold War intelligence satellites. Yet “CORONA has emerged as an irreplaceable source for reconstructing ancient landscapes.”

Declassified CORONA satellite imagery “allows virtual survey of regions where ground observation would be difficult or impossible” and it has already yielded a near doubling of the number of archeological sites of interest, Dr. Ur wrote.

See Spying on the Past: Declassified Intelligence Satellite Photographs and Near Eastern Landscapes, Near Eastern Archaeology, volume 76, no. 1 (2013).

In another promising new initiative using declassified government records, historians, statisticians, computer scientists and others at Columbia University have joined forces to try to develop new ways to derive insights from such records.

Their project, known as the Declassification Engine, works to apply statistical tools and machine learning to cast new light on declassified record collections. With such tools, the project believes it will be able to characterize declassified records in meaningful new ways.

Near-term objectives include the attribution of authorship to anonymous documents, identifying patterns of secrecy in previously redacted text, and correlating the production of (de)classified diplomatic cables with international events in order to help uncover significant events that may have gone unrecognized. Another seemingly mundane but vital goal that is coming within reach is to enable the cost-effective digitization of documents that are in non-standard formats or that are not entirely legible.

“The long-range goal is to create a cloud-based virtual archive,” according to the project website. “It would aggregate the digitized documents now scattered across dozens of different repositories, offer a place for scholars and journalists to upload their own archival finds, and provide a range of visualization and attribution tools to advance research on the history, and future, of world politics.”

See also The Ghost Files by David J. Craig, Columbia Magazine, Winter 2013-14.

For now, however, these kinds of innovative approaches to the exploitation of classified documents stand out as novelties. They are still exceptions to the conventional rule.

Even when declassification is successfully accomplished, many — probably most — declassified records go unexamined by researchers and other members of the public.

This is partly a resource issue, said William J. Bosanko, the chief operating officer of the National Archives and Records Administration. NARA’s holdings have quadrupled in the last few decades, while its staff support has remained close to level. As a result, archivists have been unable to produce detailed indexing of many incoming records so as to make them easily “discoverable.”

At the same time, there seem to be fewer and fewer individual researchers that are inclined to delve deeply into archived collections of hardcopy records. It appears that many of them — many of us — have become habituated instead to the instant gratification of online access. (There are, however, backlogs of FOIA and mandatory declassification review requests.)

The upshot is that “there are lots of [record] series never used by the public,” said Mr. Bosanko. He noted that this is true of both declassified records and of records that were never classified.

This neglect is not a reflection on the contents of those records, which are endlessly rich. “There is a huge, vast treasure trove of fascinating stories waiting to be revealed” at the National Archives, Mr. Bosanko said. But they continue to wait.

Another persistent problem is the erratic, often illogical character of the declassification process.

The Department of Defense recently sought to redact the well-known fact that there were U.S. missiles deployed in Turkey during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. This and other “inane and contradictory declassification actions” were highlighted recently by the non-profit National Security Archive.

“It is a waste of resources and a sign of a seriously defective declassification system when reviewers redact 50-year-old documents when nothing about them is sensitive,” wrote William Burr of the National Security Archive.  See Dubious Secrets of the Cuban Missile Crisis, February 21, 2014.

As with classification, so too with declassification: new oversight procedures are needed to prevent egregious errors and to promote more discriminating judgment.

Last week the Congressional Research Service published updated U.S. military casualty statistics for post-9/11 operations in Iraq and Afghanistan through January 2014. There have been 4,410 U.S. military deaths in Operation Iraqi Freedom and 2,299 U.S. military deaths in Operation Enduring Freedom to date.

While overall fatality figures are already made available on Department of Defense websites, the newly updated CRS report presents some more detailed casualty information that was obtained directly from DoD medical experts.

“This report includes statistics on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), traumatic brain injury (TBI), amputations, evacuations, and the demographics of casualties.” See A Guide to U.S. Military Casualty Statistics: Operation New Dawn, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and Operation Enduring Freedom, February 19, 2014.

Another newly updated CRS report considers the vitality of the U.S. manufacturing sector as compared to that of other countries.

“China displaced the United States as the largest manufacturing country in 2010,” CRS noted for the first time, as others have done. (Last year’s edition of the CRS report still held, based on World Bank estimates, that “The United States remained the largest manufacturing country in 2010.”)

“This report is designed to inform the debate over the health of U.S. manufacturing through a series of charts and tables that depict the position of the United States relative to other countries according to various metrics.” See U.S. Manufacturing in International Perspective, February 20, 2014.

A CRS report on the Ukraine that was updated last week has already been overtaken by the tumultuous events of the last few days. But it provides background on recent developments and congressional perspectives on them. See Ukraine: Current Issues and U.S. Policy, February 20, 2014.

And see, relatedly, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia: Political Developments and Implications for U.S. Interests, February 20, 2014. Also, European Union Enlargement, February 19, 2014.

Updates of other previously issued CRS reports include the following.

Gangs in Central America, February 20, 2014

Employment for Veterans: Trends and Programs, February 20, 2014

Countering Violent Extremism in the United States, February 19, 2014

Another CRS report finds that “Four species of non-indigenous Asian carp are expanding their range in U.S. waterways, resulting in a variety of concerns and problems.” See Asian Carp and the Great Lakes Region, January 23, 2014.

For the first time the U.S. Army has produced official doctrine on military activities in cyberspace, including offensive, defensive and network operations.

A new Army field manual “provides overarching doctrinal guidance and direction for conducting cyber electromagnetic activities (CEMA)…. It provides enough guidance for commanders and their staffs to develop innovative approaches to seize, retain, and exploit advantages throughout an operational environment.”

It is “the first doctrinal field manual of its kind.” See FM 3-38, Cyber Electromagnetic Activities, February 2014.

The manual introduces the fundamentals of cyber operations, or “cyber electromagnetic activities” (CEMA), defining terms and identifying important operational factors and constraints.

“Today’s Army must operate in cyberspace and leverage an electromagnetic spectrum that is increasingly competitive, congested, and contested.”

However, “execution of CEMA can involve significant legal and policy considerations.” Also, “possibilities of unintended or cascading effects exist and may be difficult to predict.”

Several years ago, any official discussion of offensive cyber operations was considered classified information. That is no longer the case, and the new Army manual — which itself is unclassified — treats the subject as a normal part of military conflict.

“Army forces conduct OCO [offensive cyberspace operations] across the range of military operations by targeting enemy and hostile adversary activity and related capabilities in and through cyberspace,” the Field Manual says.

Cyberspace attacks in support of offensive operations “may be directed at information resident in, or in transit between, computers (including mobile phones and personal digital assistants) and computer networks used by an enemy or adversary.”

“Cyberspace attacks may employ capabilities such as tailored computer code in and through various network nodes such as servers, bridges, firewalls, sensors, protocols, operating systems, and hardware associated with computers or processors. Tailored computer code is only one example of a cyberspace capability… designed to create an effect in or through cyberspace.”

“Cyberspace attacks may employ manipulation which includes deception, decoying, conditioning, and spoofing to control or change information, information systems, and networks.”

The Army manual also presents doctrine on defensive cyberspace operations and on information network operations. “[Defensive] countermeasures in cyberspace should not destroy or significantly impede the operations or functionality of the network they are being employed against, nor should they intentionally cause injury or the loss of life.”

The manual devotes some attention to the legal framework governing cyber operations, which “depends on the nature of the activities conducted.”  Under all circumstances, the manual says, “Army forces conducting CO [cyberspace operations] will comply with the law of war.”

Ordinarily, the manual states, the U.S. Army should not be conducting offensive cyber operations against U.S. targets. “Unless approved by appropriate authorities, Army assets cannot be used to perform attack or exploit operations on U.S. entities.”

“Commanders must ensure that the legal, constitutional, and privacy rights of U.S. citizens are protected throughout the planning and execution of [cyber operations].”

    *    *    *

“Legal Reviews of Cyber Weapons” is one of the topics addressed in the latest issue of the Journal of National Security Law and Policy.

Brendan Koerner reported on “How America’s Soldiers Fight for the Spectrum on the Battlefield” in Wired Threat Level, February 18.

New and updated reports from the Congressional Research Service that have not been made readily available to the public include the following.

Independence of Federal Financial Regulators, February 12, 2014

Small Business: Access to Capital and Job Creation, February 18, 2014

U.S.-South Korea Relations, February 12, 2014

U.S.-Japan Economic Relations: Significance, Prospects, and Policy Options, February 18, 2014

The U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement: Background and Issues, February 14, 2014

Latin America and the Caribbean: Key Issues for the 113th Congress, February 15, 2014

Bahrain: Reform, Security, and U.S. Policy, February 14, 2014

Visa Waiver Program, February 12, 2014

FBI Director: Appointment and Tenure, February 19, 2014

Official data on the number of contractors used by civilian intelligence agencies are unreliable, according to a review by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). Nor can the costs incurred by contractors be accurately assessed.

The inadequacy of the data undermines workforce management as well as contractor oversight, GAO said.

“GAO identified a number of limitations in the inventory [of intelligence contractors] that collectively limit the comparability, accuracy, and consistency of the information reported by the civilian IC [intelligence community] elements as a whole,” the GAO report said.  These limitations included changing definitions of what a core contractor is, and variability in the collection and reporting of data on their use.

The resulting inventory “does not provide insight into the functions performed by contractors, in particular those that could inappropriately influence the government’s control over its decisions.”

See Civilian Intelligence Community: Additional Actions Needed to Improve Reporting on and Planning for the Use of Contract Personnel, Government Accountability Office Report GAO-14-204, January 2014.

The intelligence community (IC) workforce is composed of three basic categories of employees:  civilian government personnel, military personnel, and core contractors.

“Core contractors” — as opposed to other individual contractors, manufacturers or service providers — may perform mission-related functions including intelligence collection, processing and analysis, as well as information technology services. (Edward Snowden was considered a core contractor.)

“While the use of contractors can provide benefits in support agency missions, such as flexibility to meet immediate needs and obtain unique expertise, their use can also introduce risks for the government to consider and manage,” the GAO report said.

But as a result of faulty data, US intelligence agencies “are not well-positioned to assess the potential effects of relying on contractor personnel.” The GAO report included recommendations for improving the quality and utility of data on intelligence contractor use.

Stephanie O’Sullivan, the Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, acknowledged that there were defects in IC reporting on contractors, but she said that things were getting better.

“There have been challenges associated with conducting the [intelligence contractor] inventory, which was one of the first of its kind in the Federal government,” she told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. “However, the IC continues to improve the capture and understanding of data on its core contract personnel.”

Ms. O’Sullivan said that reductions in the contractor population were underway, but that contractors remained indispensable.

“We have… turned the corner and for the past several years have been reducing the number of core contract personnel across the IC, both in numbers and costs. Despite these reductions, core contract personnel have now become an integral part of the IC workforce. We could not perform our mission without them,” she said.

She noted that in some cases, intelligence contractors “have given their lives for this country alongside their government colleagues.”

“Two IC contract personnel were among the nine people killed during a terrorist attack on a CIA facility located near the eastern Afghan city of Khost in December 2009, and two IC contract personnel lost their lives during the attack on US diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya, in September 2012.”

In any case, “because of the contraction in [intelligence] budgets, contractors are motivated to reduce costs…. In fact, some contractor employees are now being paid less than they were a few years back.”

The new Governmental Accountability Office report appears to represent a successful step in the development of GAO’s role in intelligence oversight.

Ms. O’Sullivan said that several of the specific steps recommended by GAO had been or would be adopted by the Intelligence Community. “These changes will bring greater transparency to the IC’s data on core contract personnel,” she said.

But it seems noteworthy that the new GAO report was requested by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs– not the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Just as the House and Senate Judiciary Committees have produced more incisive public oversight of intelligence surveillance policy than the Intelligence Committees have done over the past year, so in this case the Senate Homeland Security Committee has had more to offer the public in terms of oversight of intelligence contractors.  It is not clear why that should be so.

A GAO official downplayed this question. He said the Homeland Security Committee had a long-term interest in contractor policy throughout the government, including a series of reports requested from GAO. He added that the latest report “was distributed to all committees of jurisdiction, including the intelligence committees.” (More: Bloomberg, WaPo).

New and updated reports from the Congressional Research Service that Congress has withheld from online public distribution include the following.

The Debt Limit Since 2011, February 12, 2014

The Corporate Income Tax System: Overview and Options for Reform, February 14, 2014

The Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Strategy: In Brief, February 10, 2014

Lebanon: Background and U.S. Policy, February 14, 2014

Saudi Arabia: Background and U.S. Relations, February 12, 2014

The FutureGen Carbon Capture and Sequestration Project: A Brief History and Issues for Congress, February 10, 2014

Carbon Capture and Sequestration: Research, Development, and Demonstration at the U.S. Department of Energy, February 10, 2014

Food Fraud and “Economically Motivated Adulteration” of Food and Food Ingredients, January 10, 2014