The United States Intelligence Community: Overstaffed and Overfunded – [A TheBusySignal.com Guest Post]

The NSA Headquarters in Maryland

The Washington Post recently published its first of several installments investigating “Top Secret America,” a super-secretive cohort of United States intelligence agencies charged with keeping America safe from terrorism. The first installment concerns the “top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, [which] has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.”

The report is shocking. It describes a hyper-expansive, dangerously bloated American intelligence community bordering on the megalomaniacal, one which exists on an inconceivably grand scale and whose senior-most officials don’t even fully understand its scope or purpose. At a time when citizens and lawmakers alike are losing faith in a war waged in the name of counter-terrorism, and when out-of-control budget deficits have led to doom and gloom proclamations from both the left and the right, the article’s revelations are especially poignant.

Consider that today, the United States’ intelligence budget is 75 billion (with a “b”) dollars—two and a half times what it was on September 10th, 2001. Consider, too, that by the end of 2001, twenty-four entirely new military or intelligence agencies had been created out of thin air. In 2002, 37 more were created; in 2003, 36 more; in 2004, 26 more; in 2005, 31 more; in 2006, 32 more; and in 2007, ‘08 and ‘09, no less than 20 new agencies were created each year. The grand total for all new military or intelligence agencies created between 2001 and 2009, then, is no fewer than 246.

246 agencies. Not offices, not individual appointments or temporary taskforces, but 246 permanent organizations with their own infrastructures, employees and budgets.

This would be well and fine, of course, if it weren’t for the fact that many of these agencies—largely staffed by legions of low-paid, straight-out-of-college 20-somethings—are redundant to the point of counter-productivity. Reflecting the sort of “everything but the kitchen sink” attitude applied to military and intelligence spending following 9/11, the intelligence community has been given the freedom to produce such an overabundance of reporting that, according to officials, much of it is lost, overlooked or ignored outright by those charged with making sense of it. Remember the attempted Christmas Day bombing of Midwest Airlines flight 253 last year? It’s not that actionable, preventative intelligence didn’t exist on Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the so-called Christmas Day Bomber; but rather that the relevant reports on him had been overlooked, lost in the torrent of intelligence. The plot’s actual thwarting, then, was left up to Abdulmutallab himself, whose ineptitude at bomb detonation proved, terrifyingly, to be America’s last, best line of defense.

And then there are the inter-agency pissing contests—the instances in which intelligence organizations refuse to share information with one another out of bureaucratic spite. And their constant pursuit of bureaucratic status symbols: facilities, technology, security details, and plethoric other amenities which, needlessly and in a show of abject profligacy, are commonly afforded to those in a position to demand them.

So, who is in charge of reining in the intelligence community? In whose hands rests the absolute authority necessary to confront these improvidences? The short answer is: no one.

In 2004, the Bush Administration and Congress created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). The ODNI was birthed in an effort to create an apparatus with overarching and unchallengeable authority over the then-impetuously expanding intelligence community. Amazingly, though, the agency was never given the proper legal or budgetary authority to effectually manage the individual agencies it was charged with overseeing. Not that this ended up mattering: Immediately following the ODNI’s creation, many agencies—such as the CIA—began reclassifying and reconstituting themselves so as to exceed the purview of the ODNI and thus eschew its authority. This sort of self-protectionism, rather than any actual oversight, became a prevailing trend among agencies fighting vainly to retain their autonomy.

Of course, no one is saying that these intelligence edifices need to be done away with entirely. Quite the opposite: they are an important component of our national security apparatus. However, if they are to fulfill their purpose—to keep America safe—the nuts and bolts of these ships clearly need tightening, and lots of it. If not for the surfeits of money they waste, then for the fact that their grandeur has reached the point of self-subversion: they have simply become too big and too unwieldy to do their jobs.

Meanwhile, in non-Top Secret America, after months of painstaking deliberation, a bill that will extend unemployment benefits to jobless workers has barely limped its way through the Senate. Its costs are simply too high, the bill’s detractors charge.

Truly, desperately, we need to have a conversation about our actual intelligence needs.

Josh Hubanks is a blogger for My Dog Ate My Blog and a writer on online universities for Guide to Online Schools.