It’s time to clean house

The U.S. intelligence community is too bloated; it’s time to clean house

Transcript: It seems a fundamental rule of bureaucracies is – if you’ve got a problem throw people at money at it. The more the better.

We do it with the best of intentions, but it doesn’t always have the best of results. Sometimes we overdo it and throw so much at it that we trip all over ourselves, even make the problem worse. We’re like the Pillsbury dough boy – so bloated that we can’t get out of our own way.

This is what happened with the intelligence community after the sept 11 attacks. We realized we never saw al qaeda coming. Or we did, but never put the pieces together.

The bipartisan sept 11 commission looked at the intelligence community and concluded that we had plenty of intelligence gathering agencies, but no one organization to oversee them, and give us the kind of information we needed for this new world of Islamic jihad and terrorism. They recommended we create a single director of national intelligence to sit atop the nearly 20 intelligence agencies already in existence.

But rather than a small nimble staff that could deal swiftly and decisively, and streamline intelligence, we created another sprawling bureaucracy. We added another layer.

As one of the sept 11 commission members told me, the government did the exact Opposite of what their report recommended. A Washington Post special report concludes we now have an intelligence community that is so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one really knows much it costs, how many people it employs, or what programs it’s got.

Remember the Christmas day bomber? Turns out we did suspect something was happening in Yemen and sent teams there to investigate. They sent back reports – which were buried amidst a pile of other reports.

It’s time to do what bureaucracies hate to do – clean house!