Bush flip-flops on intelligence reform

Looks like President Bush has changed his mind on intelligence reform: The White House unveiled plans Wednesday to give a new national intelligence director strong budgetary authority over much of the nation’s intelligence community, a key provision in the Sept. 11 commission’s recommendations. President Bush intends to give the intelligence director full budget authority over ...

By , a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast.

Looks like President Bush has changed his mind on intelligence reform:

The White House unveiled plans Wednesday to give a new national intelligence director strong budgetary authority over much of the nation’s intelligence community, a key provision in the Sept. 11 commission’s recommendations. President Bush intends to give the intelligence director full budget authority over the National Foreign Intelligence Program and “the management tools” to oversee the intelligence community and integrate foreign and domestic intelligence, the White House said in a statement. The administration’s plan comes as the Senate prepares to start crafting its own legislation to address criticisms from the 9/11 commission that the nation’s 15 different intelligence agencies did not work together properly to stop the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington.

Bush’s actual statement is even more explicit: “We believe that there ought to be a National Intelligence Director who has full budgetary authority.” According to the draft plan on the White House’s web site, the NID would have significant authority over personnel decisions as well. Needless to say, this is a departure from what Bush proposed last month on the subject. I’m still not convinced it’s the right thing to do — and Phil Carter is on vacation, so I can’t ask him. What’s more interesting is why Bush changed his mind — was this just blowing with the political winds or does he believe this is the right thing to do? The title to this post suggests my thoughts on the answer. UPDATE: It occurs to me that there’s a slightly more generous interpretation of Bush’s actions — that he started out with a deliberately vague proposal and then filled in the details over time. Still, even within that vagueness, Bush implied a lot more decentralization than the current proposal. Meanwhile, over at Slate, Fred Kaplan thinks the debate over bureaucratic debate misses the point about personnel.

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner

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