9/11 Panel Members to Lobby for a Restructured Congress [NY Times]

NY Times ^ | Dec 21, 2004 | PHILIP SHENON and ERIC LIPTON

[Tumbleweed_Connection]

Fresh from their role in overhauling the nation's intelligence agencies, members of the independent Sept. 11 commission say they will now lobby to restructure Congress and what the commission described in its final report as the lawmakers' "dysfunctional" oversight of the C.I.A., other spy agencies and the Department of Homeland Security.

The commissioners, who have formed a private group known as the 9/11 Public Discourse Project, say their lobbying effort will begin in earnest next month, when Congress returns from its holiday recess. The lobbying campaign appears to have the support of the White House, which has called for the sort of Congressional restructuring recommended by the commission.

The panel's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, a Republican and former governor of New Jersey, said the commission's 10 members were delighted by the passage this month of a sweeping intelligence overhaul bill that enacted the commission's central recommendation: creation of the job of national intelligence director to oversee the Central Intelligence Agency and other spy agencies.

"But we've still got a ways to go; there are still some things that are very important in our report that have not been implemented," Mr. Kean said, referring to a host of recommendations by the panel for streamlining Congressional oversight of intelligence agencies and the Homeland Security Department. "There has to be more power given to those intelligence committees."

In its unanimous final report in July, the commission cataloged years of turf battles and incompetence by the intelligence and counterterrorism agencies, especially the C.I.A. and the F.B.I., and suggested that Congress had to share the blame for the failure to disrupt the Sept. 11 terrorist plot.

"Congressional oversight for intelligence and counterterrorism is now dysfunctional," the report said. "So long as oversight is governed by current Congressional rules and resolutions, we believe the American people will not get the security they need and want."

The commission called either for the creation of a powerful joint Congressional committee on intelligence, combining the separate intelligence committees in the House and Senate, or for keeping the House and Senate committees intact but providing them with appropriation powers, allowing them to guarantee that spy programs backed by the committees would be paid for.

The commission also called for the Homeland Security Department, which now answers to scores of Congressional committees, to be brought under the oversight of single permanent committees in the House and Senate.

But after the release of the Sept. 11 commission's report, lawmakers showed far more enthusiasm for overhauling executive branch spy agencies than for reorganizing themselves, and there is no sign that House or Senate leaders are considering the sort of broad Congressional restructuring recommended by the commission.

In votes in October, the Senate agreed to some of the panel's more modest proposals for reorganizing Congress, like removing the term limits on members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, but rejected the commission's larger set of recommendations.

The speaker of the House, J. Dennis Hastert, has suggested through spokesmen that House Republican leaders will not act on the commission's call for granting appropriation powers to the House Intelligence Committee or for merging it into a joint House-Senate committee, saying that the commission's proposals might dangerously limit oversight.

"Some of these proposals are nonstarters up here," said Representative Jane Harman of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. "I don't think the House leadership or the House committee leadership will let them happen. House reforms aren't even a subject on the table yet."

The commission's proposal that the House and Senate intelligence committees be given the right to appropriate billions of dollars for intelligence programs is considered especially unlikely to be adopted, since it would require the powerful House and Senate appropriations committees to cede budget authority that they jealously guard.

Mr. Hastert has endorsed the call by the Sept. 11 commission for creation of a permanent Homeland Security Committee, extending the life of a special committee set up a year after the Sept. 11 attacks. But the panel's chairman, Representative Christopher Cox, Republican of California, said that making the committee permanent was not enough; he said that without much broader legislative and oversight powers, the committee would simply add to a bureaucratic morass.

"The only rationale to create the Department of Homeland Security in the first place was that these 22 agencies could be more than the sum of their parts," Mr. Cox said. "If Congress insists on treating them forever as separate entities answerable to separate Congressional committees under separate authorizing legislation, they will be forever segregated."

In the Senate, the Governmental Affairs Committee is being renamed the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, but it is not being given jurisdiction over several of the largest agencies within the Homeland Security Department, which will continue to report to other Senate committees.

There is no shortage of voices calling for powerful and unified Congressional oversight. A report this month by a research group led by Thomas S. Foley, a Democrat and former House speaker, and Warren B. Rudman, a Republican and former senator from New Hampshire, called for streamlined oversight of the Homeland Security Department, joining with the Sept. 11 commission in describing Congressional oversight as dysfunctional.

"No large organization could operate with such disjointed oversight; neither can a department charged with safeguarding the security of the American people," the report said, noting that 412 of the 435 House members and all 100 senators had some form of jurisdiction over the Homeland Security Department through their committee memberships.

[mrtoby]

How are we ever going to be able to get rid of these people?!?!?!?!

[SE Mom]

Geeeesh...next thing you know they'll want to re-write the Constitution.

[OldFriend]

Like a fungus, these parasites have burrowed in thanks to their being annointed by the media.

[TomGuy]

They created a bureaucratic monster and now they are trying to figure out how to control it with the Hydra-type Congressional monster.



This is just more and more bureaucratic mess.

They insisted on creating the Homeland Security Department. That idea was sold as the solution.

Then, they insisted on creating the Intel Czar. That idea was sold as the solution.

Now they are trying to sell a super-Congressional-committee.

[malia]

bttt