Posted on 10/30/2007 12:07:53 PM PDT by BGHater
WASHINGTON -The U.S. government spent $43.5 billion on intelligence in 2007, according to the first official disclosure under a new law implementing recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission.
Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell released the newly declassified figure Tuesday. In a statement, the DNI said there would be no additional disclosures of classified budget information beyond the overall spending figure because "such disclosures could harm national security."
How the money is divided among the 16 intelligence agencies and exactly what it is spent on is classified. It includes salaries for about 100,000 people, multibillion dollar secret satellite programs, aircraft, weapons, electronic sensors, intelligence analysts, spies, computers and software.
Much of the intelligence budget __ about 70 percent__ goes to contractors for the procurement of technology and services including analysis, according to a May 2007 chart from the DNI's office.
Intelligence spending has increased by a third over 10 years ago, in inflation adjusted dollars, according to Steve Kosiak at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
In 1997 and 1998, the CIA voluntarily disclosed the intelligence budget at $26.6 billion and $26.7 billion, respectively. That revelation came in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, D.C.
Aftergood said he was somewhat surprised that the 2007 budget is not higher. He had conservatively estimated it at $45 billion. The national intelligence budget does not include at least $10 billion spent by military intelligence operations.
The intelligence budget itself increased sharply after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, according to heavily censored U.S. government charts.
The intelligence agencies have fought multiple legal attempts to disclose their budgets, including the CIA, the National Reconnaissance Office, National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the agencies inside the State, Treasury and Homeland Security departments, among others. They have argued that adversaries can divine secrets about intelligence activities if they can track budget fluctuations year to year.
According to a law signed by President Bush in August, overall intelligence spending must be disclosed 30 days after the close of the fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30. The government must also disclose the figure for 2008. Beginning in 2009, the president may waive the disclosure requirement if he can make the case to Congress it would harm national security.
The requirement was a provision of a broad security measure carrying out recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission in 2004. The panel argued that overclassification does not contribute to good government, and that revealing the overall spending for intelligence activities would help Congress in its oversight duties.
A top intelligence official inadvertently disclosed the overall intelligence spending figure two years ago at a conference in San Antonio, Texas, that was open to the public. She said it was $44 billion.
National security analysts outside the government usually estimate the annual budget at about 10 percent of the total U.S. defense budget, which in 2007 was about $430 billion plus nearly $200 billion in war spending. These analysts believe around 80 percent of the intelligence budget is consumed by the NRO, NSA, DIA and NGA, the national military intelligence agencies.
(This version CORRECTS INSERTS 5th graf to correct budget comparison for inflation)
there is no A or P in intelligence
It costs many dollars to have redundant systems, too many government workers you can’t fire, people making decisions on computers that know one company or nothing, COTS software that has so many patches you can’t up grade it, and people who move their jobs every two years.
Is that all? I’d like to see the government-wide figure for what was spent on toilet paper for comparison. That might help with perspective.
Quick! Buy Intel stock! .... write me an order for 10,000 shares of INTC, what? uh, wait, oh .... never mind.
We could probably save billions of dollars by getting rid of the leftist clinton deadwood in the CIA, NSA, and the other intelligence agencies.
Sound familiar?
Good; it wasn’t spent on welfare....
Gee, for $ 260,000 they could have paid for FreeRepublic for one year and received better information.
443.5 billion?
We sure aren’t getting our moneys worth.
And 10 bucks on a fence.........
Not Me...
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