The Intelligence Community Lacks Intelligence

Being from Northern Virginia, I have several family members who have worked for the government and one in particular has worked for the intelligence community (IC). He, unfortunately, is dumbfounded by how unintelligent said community is. He has reported back that the IC as a whole, because of their classified nature, gets away with some shady business. He has been repeatedly frustrated and annoyed with the "busy work" that his team is assigned to because it demonstrates the inefficiency that continues to persist in that particular bureaucracy. He would admit that the IC's work, for the most part, is very important. However, these agencies lack proper oversight due to their secretive nature, satisfying Niskanen's model almost perfectly. Not only will these bureaucracies seek to maximize the budget, they are also monopoly suppliers of their respective information, and the true cost schedule is only known by the executives within a particular agency because of the classified nature of their jobs. These IC agencies will then seek to push Congress's surplus to 0 even though each bureaucracy is not using their resources effectively, as my family member has seen firsthand. 

This is not a new problem. The IC budget has proven to go unchecked even by Congressmen/women who create them. As it is spelled out in the jurisdiction for the Senate Appropriations Committee, these committees are influenced not only by their own self-interests ideologically (as Weingast/Moran might argue), but they also might hear out their constituencies, the public, and the President's requests for any budgetary changes. Yet, because the output for the IC is ambiguous and mostly classified, the public and even many high-ranking government officials do not even know how inefficient these bureaucracies are, and they may be arguing for unneeded increases in their spending abilities. With consistently increasing budgets and my family member's astute observations, I would be cautious -- just as the Liberty Lobby was back in 1982 -- to trust that the funds being allocated are being utilized to their fullest extent.