U.S. intelligence agencies are anticipating budget reductions of billions of dollars, said Director of National Intelligence James Clapper yesterday. He said he had just submitted a draft budget to OMB (presumably for FY 2013) that involved “double digit” cuts to the intelligence budget over ten years. See “U.S. Spies Facing Tens of Billions in Budget Cuts” by Sharon Weinberger, Wired Danger Room, October 17.
“In the last 10 years,… all we had to do essentially was preside over handing out more money and more people every year,” DNI Clapper told a joint hearing of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees last month.
But “now we’re in a ‘we’re-running-out-of-money-so-we-must-begin-to-think’ mode,” he said. “I think that is serving as the stimulus, if you will, to do some more creative thinking. I think this would do wonders in terms of saving money, efficiency, and promoting integration.”
“Everything we do in intelligence… is not of equal merit. Some things are more valuable than others, particularly as we look to the future. I think it’s very important to try to protect that valuable and most valuable resource we have, which is our people. We must continue some way of hiring every year, which we didn’t do in many cases during that seven-year hiatus period [in the 1990s]. We must try to sustain healthy R&D for the future. And I think we have to be rather cold-hearted and objective about the real contribution the various systems make. So that’s kind of the approach we’re going to take,” DNI Clapper told Congress last month.
“I don’t want anyone to be under the mistaken impression that we are going to sustain all the capabilities we have today, because we’re not,” he said.
Investing in interventions behind the walls is not just a matter of improving conditions for incarcerated individuals—it is a public safety and economic imperative. By reducing recidivism through education and family contact, we can improve reentry outcomes and save billions in taxpayer dollars.
The U.S. government should establish a public-private National Exposome Project (NEP) to generate benchmark human exposure levels for the ~80,000 chemicals to which Americans are regularly exposed.
The federal government spends billions every year on wildfire suppression and recovery. Despite this, the size and intensity of fires continues to grow, increasing costs to human health, property, and the economy as a whole.
To respond and maintain U.S. global leadership, USAID should transition to heavily favor a Fixed-Price model to enhance the United States’ ability to compete globally and deliver impact at scale.