[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 156 (2010), Part 10]
[House]
[Pages 13758-13759]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




  THE INTELLIGENCE BUREAUCRACY: THINKING BIG INSTEAD OF THINKING SMART

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from California (Ms. Woolsey) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Ms. WOOLSEY. Mr. Speaker, I imagine many of my colleagues have read 
The Washington Post report on ``Top Secret America,'' and I hope they 
are reacting as I am, with horror and outrage at the sprawling national 
security and intelligence bureaucracy that has grown like a weed in 
recent years. This series of articles should shock us into action, at 
the very least leading us to question the conventional wisdom about how 
best to keep America safe.
  According to the Post, the counterterrorism and homeland security 
apparatus has ballooned to some 1,271 government organizations working 
in roughly 10,000 locations around the country. There are now so many 
agencies analyzing so much information and issuing so many reports that 
the whole thing has become redundant, unmanageable, and ineffective.
  Actually, we can't measure its precise effectiveness because so much 
of it is shrouded in secrecy. Much of the information about these 
agencies is classified and therefore not subject to the scrutiny it so 
badly needs.
  If this system, which is so big that the Post refers to it as a 
fourth branch of government, were a domestic social program, my friends 
on the other side of the aisle would call it out-of-control spending.

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  Yet somehow, when the antigovernment rhetoric starts flying, it is 
never the wasteful defense and intelligence programs that come in for 
the harshest criticism. I'd be curious to hear, for example, why we can 
afford this behemoth, but we can't afford to pass a comprehensive jobs 
package. The organizational chart for this system looks like an octopus 
family on steroids, Mr. Speaker, and there are so many tentacles that 
it makes the proper information sharing and dot connecting nearly 
impossible.
  I couldn't help but note the irony. If memory serves me, 9/11 exposed 
the inability of our intelligence agencies to coordinate and 
communicate properly with one another. So what have we done in response 
to 9/11?
  We've grown our intelligence infrastructure in a way that makes it 
even harder to coordinate and communicate.
  Of course, we would tolerate a little bit of bloat if the evidence 
were clear that the system were working; but according to the Post's 
analysis, both the Fort Hood shooting and the Christmas Day bomber 
could have been intercepted early on if this bureaucracy hadn't been so 
unwieldy, so inefficient and unresponsive. The intelligence was there, 
but it never got into the right hands or it was lost in an avalanche of 
other data.
  Mr. Speaker, when it comes to protecting America, we are thinking big 
instead of thinking smart. There has to be a better way. We can have 
the intelligence capabilities we need at a fraction of the current 
cost, and we can use much of the savings on initiatives that attack 
terrorism at its roots--in places where despair and hopelessness lead 
people to turn to terrorism in the first place. We need to dramatically 
increase our investment in everything from agriculture to education to 
democracy-building to conflict resolution in the trouble spots of the 
world.
  Maybe if we increased our global humanitarian outreach, if we 
empowered nations instead of invading and occupying them, then top 
secret America wouldn't even be necessary.

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