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| July 20, 2010: The Washington Post started a series of stories on the federal government's intelligence community yesterday, Monday, July 19, 2010, and the stories allege that intelligence operations are in disarray, with alleged mismanagemnt, lack of communication, duplicity, wasteful spending, confusion, over-staffing, and general poor performance, according to the Post. "The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, 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 Post alleged in the first part of the series, which is running this week in the newspaper. The Post said that 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States; an estimated 854,000 people hold top-secret security clearances; in Washington, D.C., and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001; and many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. The Post said 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks. The Post also said that the government publishes 50,000 intelligence reports each year, and many of them are "routinely ignored." David C. Gompert, the Acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI), yesterday, June 19, disputed the allegations in the Post story. "The reporting does not reflect the Intelligence Community we know," Gompert said in a statement. "We accept that we operate in an environment that limits the amount of information we can share. However, the fact is, the men and women of the Intelligence Community have improved our operations, thwarted attacks, and are achieving untold successes every day. In recent years, we have reformed the IC in ways that have improved the quality, quantity, regularity, and speed of our support to policymakers, warfighters, and homeland defenders, and we will continue our reform efforts. We provide oversight, while also encouraging initiative. We work constantly to reduce inefficiencies and redundancies, while preserving a degree of intentional overlap among agencies to strengthen analysis, challenge conventional thinking, and eliminate single points of failure. We are mindful of the size of our contractor ranks, but greatly value the critical flexibility and specialized skills they contribute to our mission." The federal government has publicly said that the estimated budget for the federal government's intelligence operations is about $75 billion. |
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