Intelligence Overhaul

Recently, there have been a few articles concerning how GOP memebers of the house blocked a vote on the intelligence bill that detailed the recommendations from the 9/11 commission. Here is an article from CNN and one from the NY Times about the issue. The topic relates pretty closely to our discussions in class about whether agencies are autonomous or not. One noteworthy point was a quote from Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert: "When it comes to a question of the safety of our troops, I don't think we should have any question at all. For our members to move a piece of legislation, they have to have confidence that we do no harm, that we actually make sure that our troops are safe." His statement was about how parts of the legislation were not defined well enough. The apparent desire to have an in-depth understanding of the workings of the bill seems to be one example that supports the Congressional Dominance approach. Although Congress does not seem to have an in-depth knowledge of the issues in general, when they are not pleased with the end results, they do get more involved to regulate agencies. Likewise, the possibility of creating a director to oversee all the intelligence agencies fits into a similar scheme, where Congress maintains the ability to control agencies, but only acts to enforce regulations when they need to. In this case, Hastert's opinion actually protected the status quo for the moment (i.e. not advocating additional regulations yet), however it is clear that overall there has been a shift towards more closely scrutinizing what the intelligence agencies have been doing.

Another interesting quote was from Thomas H. Kean, chairman of the 9/11 commission: "I think there's no question that there are people in the Pentagon who want the status quo, and they fought very hard with their allies in Congress for the status quo." In context, Pentagon officials were acting to protect their power and budget, which follows the model of agent's self-interest we've seen. However, in this case the officials were acting more like an interest group affecting policy decisions instead of agents trying to maximize their budget. Assuming Kean is right about Pentagon employees working to enact a decision, it presents a means for agencies to have a degree of autonomy not really explored in the models. An action like this would be somewhat similar to an entry barrier (at least on the senior bureaucrat level, as a director to oversee all the intelligence agencies has been proposed). Assuming the agencies are actually inefficient, such a behavior is like the rent-seeking activities we have studied.

Overall, the topic is pretty interesting, as it is a current example of agency regulation, with interesting variations from the models we've been studying.