[W]ASHINGTON — Under current law, the country’s top intelligence agencies are not required to make public any information about their budgets.
A new bill offered by a bipartisan group of lawmakers including Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., seeks to change that.
Welch, along with Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., and Sens. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., introduced legislation last week that would require 16 intelligence agencies to disclose their top-line spending numbers publicly.
“The way it is right now, these budgets are black box and most members of Congress have no idea what we’re spending (money) on,” Welch said Monday afternoon.
For lawmakers to access information about the agencies’ budgets now, they need to promise that they will not share the information they get.
“You’re hamstrung as a member of Congress,” he said.
The congressman said the lack of public oversight on the budgets of entities including the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and others makes it more likely that large sums of money will be spent on programs that are problematic or not effective.
Welch pointed to the NSA data collection program exposed by leaks of former contractor Edward Snowden as an example of an initiative that could have used more scrutiny from Congress.
He also pointed to a $500 million military program that aimed to train Syrian rebels, which was later reported to have only trained five fighters. Welch said it was an “ill-advised” program in the context of a complex conflict.
Having this top-line data, which is currently treated as classified information, can help lawmakers and citizens ask the right questions about major components of the agency budgets.
Redundancy among the 16 agencies is another concern, Welch said. There is “enormous potential for wasting money with duplicated efforts,” he said.
Welch argues that requiring public disclosure of the total agency spending numbers would allow Congress some level of oversight without compromising the agencies’ methods and sources.
Welch said increased transparency around intelligence spending was one of the recommendations in the report of the commission convened after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
“That’s given me a lot of confidence that more transparency is helpful, more secrecy is harmful,” he said.