Intelligence Spending: Public Disclosure Issues

Publication Date: February 2007

Publisher: Library of Congress. Congressional Research Service

Author(s):

Research Area: Government

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Abstract:

Although the United States Intelligence Community encompasses large Federal agencies -- the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National Reconnaissance Office, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), and the National Security Agency (NSA) -- among others -- neither Congress nor the executive branch has regularly made public the total extent of intelligence spending. Rather, intelligence programs and personnel are largely contained, but not identified, within the capacious budget of the Department of Defense (DOD). This practice has long been criticized by proponents of open government and many argue that the end of the Cold War has long since removed any justification for secret budgets. In 2004, the 9/11 Commission recommended that "the overall amounts of money being appropriated for national intelligence and to its component agencies should no longer be kept secret."

The Constitution mandates regular statements and accounts of expenditures, but the courts have regarded the Congress as having the power to define the meaning of the clause. From the creation of the modern U.S. Intelligence Community in the late 1940s, Congress and the executive branch shared a determination to keep intelligence spending secret. Proponents of this practice have argued that disclosures of major changes in intelligence spending from one year to the next would provide hostile parties with information on new program or cutbacks that could be exploited to U.S. disadvantage. Secondly, they believe that it would be practically impossible to limit disclosure to total figures and that explanations of what is included or excluded would lead to damaging revelations.

On the other hand, some Members dispute these arguments, stressing the positive effects of open government and the distortions of budget information that occur when the budgets of large agencies are classified. Legislation has been twice enacted expressing the "sense of the Congress" that total intelligence spending figures should be made public, but on several separate occasions both the House and the Senate have voted against making such information public. The Clinton Administration released total appropriations figures for intelligence and intelligence-related activities for fiscal years 1997 and 1998, but subsequently such numbers have not been made public. Legal efforts to force release of intelligence spending figures have been unsuccessful.

Central to consideration of the issue is the composition of the "intelligence budget." Intelligence authorization bills have included not just the "National Intelligence Program" -- the budgets for CIA, DIA, NSA et al., but also a wide variety of other intelligence and intelligence-related efforts conducted by the Defense Department. Shifts of tactical programs into or out of the total intelligence budgets have hitherto been important only to budget analysts; disclosing total intelligence budgets could make such transfers matters of concern to a far larger audience. Legislation reported by the Senate Intelligence Committee in January 2007 (S. 372) would require that funding for the National Intelligence Program be made public but it does not address other intelligence activities. Earlier versions of this Report were entitled Intelligence Spending: Should Total Amounts Be Made Public? This report will be updated as circumstances change.