FAS

A New Milestone in Intelligence Budget Disclosure

02.15.11 | 2 min read | Text by Steven Aftergood

The Director of National Intelligence on Monday did what has never been done before:  He disclosed the size of the coming year’s budget request for the National Intelligence Program.  For Fiscal Year 2012, “The aggregate amount of appropriations requested for the National Intelligence Program is $55 billion,” according to a February 14 ODNI news release (pdf).

The new disclosure was required by the FY2010 intelligence authorization act (sec. 364).  That legislation permitted an optional Presidential waiver of disclosure if necessary on national security grounds, but no waiver was asserted.

The disclosure of the budget request constitutes a new milestone in the “normalization” of intelligence budgeting. It sets the stage for a direct appropriation of intelligence funds, to replace the deliberately misleading practice of concealing intelligence funds within the defense budget.  Doing so would also enable the Pentagon to (accurately) report a smaller total budget figure, a congenial prospect in tight budget times.  (See “Intelligence Budget Disclosure: What Comes Next?”, Secrecy News, November 1, 2010.)

The publication of the intelligence budget request is the culmination of many years of contentious debate and litigation on the subject.

Until quite recently, intelligence community leaders firmly opposed disclosure both of the intelligence budget total and of the total budget request.  In response to a 1999 lawsuit brought by the Federation of American Scientists, Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet said that revealing the budget request would damage national security and compromise intelligence methods.

“I have determined that disclosure of the budget request or the total appropriation reasonably could be expected to provide foreign intelligence services with a valuable benchmark for identifying and frustrating United States’ intelligence programs,” DCI Tenet wrote in a sworn declaration.  The court upheld the classification of the requested information.

Was DCI Tenet wrong then about the damaging effects of disclosure?  Is DNI Clapper wrong now to dismiss the significance of such damage?  Could they somehow both be right?

From our perspective, Mr. Tenet was wrong in 1999, and the damage he foresaw would not have resulted from the disclosure that he prevented. (It turns out that the FOIA litigation process is not an effective way to contest such judgments.)

More fundamentally, the changing official assessment of the need to classify this information reflects the subjectivity that is inherent in the classification process, which makes it possible for two intelligence community leaders to reach opposing conclusions.

The same subjectivity prevails today.  Thus, while the budget request for the National Intelligence Program (NIP) has now been disclosed, the request for the Military Intelligence Program (MIP) remains classified.  We have requested release of this information.

The $55 billion requested for the NIP in FY 2012 represents a slight increase over the $53.1 billion appropriated for the NIP in FY 2010.  The FY 2011 NIP appropriation has not yet been published.  It is supposed to be disclosed at the end of the current fiscal year.

publications
See all publications
Nuclear Weapons
Blog
New Voices on Nuclear Weapons Fellowship: Creative Perspectives on Rethinking Nuclear Deterrence 

To empower new voices to start their career in nuclear weapons studies, the Federation of American Scientists launched the New Voices on Nuclear Weapons Fellowship. Here’s what our inaugural cohort accomplished.

11.28.23 | 3 min read
read more
Science Policy
Article
Expected Utility Forecasting for Science Funding

Common frameworks for evaluating proposals leave this utility function implicit, often evaluating aspects of risk, uncertainty, and potential value independently and qualitatively.

11.20.23 | 11 min read
read more
Nuclear Weapons
Report
Nuclear Notebook: Nuclear Weapons Sharing, 2023

The FAS Nuclear Notebook is one of the most widely sourced reference materials worldwide for reliable information about the status of nuclear weapons and has been published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists since 1987. The Nuclear Notebook is researched and written by the staff of the Federation of American Scientists’ Nuclear Information Project: Director Hans […]

11.17.23 | 1 min read
read more
Social Innovation
Blog
Community School Approach Reaches High of 60%, Reports Latest Pulse Panel

According to the National Center for Education Statistics’ August 2023 pulse panel, 60% of public schools were utilizing a “community school” or “wraparound services model” at the start of this school year—up from 45% last year.

11.17.23 | 4 min read
read more