On Tuesday of last week, Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) was interviewed by NPR. The discussion touched on his opinion of Edward Snowden — whistle-blower or traitor, depending on who you talk to — but more importantly, focused on the bill he is sponsoring, the Intelligence Budget Transparency Act of 2014. While the name is fairly straightforward, in sum, it requires that each budget submitted by a president include dollar amounts for the “intelligence or intelligence related activities” of each intelligence agency. The most basic level of transparency at least is necessary in all government decisions so that we can better understand where money is being spent, and whether or not it is actually working towards a useful purpose.
The Washington Post last year put together a chart, in which they claimed that the black budget reached a total of $52.6 billion in 2013, and the intelligence apparatus was still “unable to provide critical information to the president on a range of national security threats.” This is the same billion dollar creation which oversaw the enormous NSA spying projects that multiple officials have claimed have allowed the government to gain intelligence key to stopping more than 50 terrorist threats to the United States, a claim which still is unverifiable, largely because the information has remained classified, thanks to claims by the administration and other intelligence agency leaders that it would cause harm to the current system.
In a response to The Washington Post in 2013 about the classified budget, Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, argued that “Our budgets are classified as they could provide insight for foreign intelligence services” that would limit the ability of American agencies to gather intelligence and effectively deal with threats to national security. While I understand the sentiment that Director Clapper expressed, I do wonder if there is really such harm in allowing a semi-transparent budget to be available to the public so that there can be a better sense of accountability. It is ludicrous to assume that foreign intelligence services would not already be operating under the assumption that U.S. services have the funding and access to almost preposterous levels of ability to gather information. Writing a black check and allowing the agencies to do as they please with almost no public oversight is a serious failing on the part of the entire government of the U.S.
The Obama administration and the intelligence agencies themselves are not the only ones at fault, regardless of how Congressional representatives attempt to portray themselves. In a recent TED talk by Richard Ledgett, the Deputy Director of the NSA, he argued that the NSA provided all relevant information to the overseeing committees of Congress and that it was a failing on their part not to disseminate that information fully throughout the representatives. I’m sure that many representatives and Ledgett have differing opinions on what constitutes “all relevant information,” yet there is something to be said for that. Our representatives are supposed to do exactly that. They are elected by the people of their home states and sent to make those positions clear on issues. If they find that there is something which they or their constituencies are unaware of or uncomfortable about, the burden is on them to push for better and more transparency in those issues. Our representatives should not wait for a private contractor to feel obliged to release a treasure trove of documents to the whole world to demand more oversight on dark budgets and agencies. They are the ones who should push for more oversight so that the private contractors of the U.S. I do not feel so obliged. They have failed in that regard, and while their current efforts are great, they also appear to be the efforts of representatives working to limit the damage to their own reputation because of their failings.
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