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.
The proposed Office will resurrect the long-closed Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), the archive of which has been maintained by FAS for decades at https://ota.fas.org/.
If Congress needs help understanding the risks and rewards of a piece of technology, they shouldn’t have to rely solely on the sparknotes from a salesman. The rub is much simpler: Congress needs nerds.
If we set up the new OTA to do its job well, members will see it as the first stop to see what issues are lurking around the corner. They will bring their questions early. And they will keep coming back for more.
Even the best-designed policy rests on assumptions about who will staff it, how it will be funded, whether the responsible institutions have ever coordinated, and if the goals are achievable.