The proposal forthcoming from the 9-11 Commission to create a Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to oversee all of the federal government's intelligence activities will be no panacea to solve all the problems that have plagued the American intelligence community for years. Surely, though, it will be a step in the right direction. That the community's work should be coordinated, rather than confused and riven by interagency rivalries, is obvious. Indeed, it's so obvious that the legislation setting up the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Council, and other key pillars of the American national security apparatus in the wake of World War II envisioned just that. The CIA chief is intended to be not only the top man at one agency, but also a true Director of Central Intelligence -- the president and the National Security Council's adviser on all things intelligence, including those matters that fall outside the CIA's purview.
The reality, over the decades, has proven to be quite different. He who controls the budget controls the bureaucracy, and the bulk of the intelligence money in the current setup is controlled not by the CIA but by the Secretary of Defense. This includes not only each military's service's own intelligence arm, but also the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the National Reconnaissance Office, many of which do tasks that go far beyond the sort of battlefield intelligence that is the Pentagon's proper purview.
Proposals to change this system are always controversial within the executive-branch bureaucracy, since fixing it through the creation of a DNI to oversee it all would necessarily take a lot of power away from the Secretary of Defense and some from the CIA Director. But there's no reason to think the controversy should take a particularly partisan cast, as witnessed by the bipartisan 9-11 Commission's recent embrace of the idea; indeed, a previous bipartisan congressional inquiry into September 11 also reached the same conclusion. According to all reports, meanwhile, a special presidential advisory panel set up several years ago under former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft recommended something very similar.
Despite this, the dispute has somehow become a partisan one. The Democratic members of the House Intelligence Committee unanimously introduced legislation to make the change and there's been no action. The minority staff of the House Committee on Homeland Security produced a "comprehensive plan" for winning the war on terrorism that was broken down into helpful component elements, including the intelligence reform proposal, and there was no action. The president, after asking for the Scowcroft Commission's advice, chose not to take that advice. Instead, he had the report classified. John Kerry, meanwhile, has followed his colleagues in the House and embraced the DNI proposal as the centerpiece of his intelligence-reform plan.
So what's the Bush administration's problem with this? They don't claim that every independent inquiry into the situation is getting things wrong. Instead, action is always premature. The administration needs more time. The Scowcroft Commission's recommendations are still under review. For months they said they wanted to wait for the official release of the 9-11 Commission's recommendations before doing anything, even though everyone who follows the issue already knew exactly what they would say about it. Now White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan says the president is "open to additional ideas that build upon the reforms we are already implementing." But what's taking so long? What more urgent priorities has the wartime president had than to deal with than a recommendation that's been issued again and again by everyone charged with studying the topic?
As for the reforms they're already implementing, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, meanwhile, doesn't feel the need to wait before taking action -- he went ahead and made things worse. His idea of centralizing and rationalizing the intelligence community is was to create an Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, who oversees all of the Defense Department's various intelligence activities. Steven Cambone is on the job as we speak. The upshot of the action is to make a confused situation that much more confused. Cambone now has the specific job of running 70 percent of the nation's intelligence budget, while George Tenet's successor is supposed to somehow be the country's top intelligence officer. It's a recipe for chaos and conflict, but if it forestalls the creation of a DNI it will preserve the Pentagon's power and, indeed, might centralize enough power in Cambone's office to make him the key player in intelligence debates, essentially ensuring that no independent scrutiny will be given to Defense Department views on important questions.
There's no justification for this plan -- partisan, ideological, or otherwise -- which is why it finds precisely zero support from Republican members of independent inquiries. It's something Rumsfeld likes, something Rumsfeld's employees like, and something Rumsfeld's friends -- like his old buddy the Vice President of the United States -- like.
That Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney should take this attitude is disappointing, but hardly surprising. Self-serving advisers and bureaucrats are a fact of life in any administration, not something new. What is new is that the United States now has a president who can't understand the policy arguments that would let him cut through his advisers' fog. Under normal circumstances, the sort of games Rumsfeld is playing only work on relatively low-profile issues. When a president really wants to focus on an issue of national importance, he normally consults widely and figures out the difference between genuine advice and bureaucratic self-promotion. Now, though, we have a president who proclaims that he doesn't read newspapers, who values loyalty above all else, and who is, to use the current euphemism, rather intellectually uncurious relative to his predecessors. The result is that when key advisers don't want something to change, it doesn't change, even though reform would be both in the country's interest and the president's. So reports pile on top of reports -- but if no one in the Oval Office reads them, they make no sound and lead to no reforms. And the situation won't change until the country has a president with the wherewithal to lead where the country needs to go, whether or not his advisers like it.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect writing fellow. His column on politics and the media appears every Tuesday.
