total intelligence budget 2005 leaked(?): 60 gigabucks

[Eugen Leitl]

http://www.thespywhobilledme.com/the_spy_who_billed_me/2007/06/exclusive_offic.html

Exclusive: Office of Nation's Top Spy Inadvertently Reveals Key to Classified
National Intel Budget

Dni_sealIn a holdover from the Cold War when the number really did matter to
national security, the size of the US national intelligence budget remains
one of the government's most closely guarded secrets.  The Office of the
Director of National Intelligence, the highest intelligence agency in the
country that oversees all federal intelligence agencies, appears to have
inadvertently released the keys to that number in an unclassified PowerPoint
presentation now posted on the website of the Defense Intelligence Agency
(DIA). By reverse engineering the numbers in an underlying data element
embedded in the presentation, it seems that the total budget of the 16 US
intelligence agencies in fiscal year 2005 was $60 billion, almost 25% higher
than previously believed.

In the presentation originally made to a DIA conference in Colorado on May
14, Terri Everett, an Office of the Director of National Intelligence senior
procurement executive, revealed that 70% of the total Intelligence Community
budget is spent on contractors.  (This was reported by Tim Shorrock on
Salon.com.)  Everett also included a slide depicting the trend of award
dollars to contractors by the Intelligence Community from fiscal year 95
through a partial year of fiscal year 06 (i.e. through August 31st of FY06.)
Because these figures are classified, a scale of the total number of award
dollars was omitted from the Y-axis of the bar chart.  The PowerPoint
presentation was first obtained by Shorrock for Salon.com and it was later
posted on the DIA's website where I downloaded it.  Although it would not
have been visible to the conference attendees, the data underlying the bar
graph--the total amount of Intelligence Community funds spent on
contractors--is readily available in the actual presentation.  By double
clicking on the bar chart,  a small spreadsheet with the raw classified data
appears:

Odnislide11

(To view this spreadsheet in the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence's actual PowerPoint presentation, make sure you are opening the
presentation in the PowerPoint program and not a web browser, view slide #11
and, depending upon your version of PowerPoint, making sure you're not on the
9/11 image object double-click on the chart or right click on it and choose
Chart Object/Open.)

Here are the dollar amounts in tens of millions spent by the US Intelligence
Community on contractors, according to the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence, as embedded in the spreadsheet data underlying the bar graph
(pictured above):

Contractordollars_2

Note:  FY06 data as of 31 August.  (The numbers are in tens of millions of
dollars, although this is not noted, but it is previously known that the
amount spent on contracts is a double-digit billion plus dollar figure.)

This 70% of the Intelligence Community budget spent on contractors most
likely includes all Intelligence Community direct acquisitions from
contractors, including satellites and other very expensive hardware programs
as well as more mundane supplies in addition to contracted services--(e.g.
"green badgers" or staff contracted to the CIA.)  The remaining 30% of the
Intelligence Community budget most likely includes both personnel (i.e.,
civilian federal employee) and as well as intergovernmental operations and
maintenance and supplies (e.g. payments by some Intelligence Community
elements to GSA to lease office space and acquire government pens and office
supplies.)  By taking the 70% of the intelligence community budget that now
goes to contractors in conjunction with the actual dollars spent on
contractors, it is possible to reverse-engineer the budget using simple
algebra.

This top line $60 billion figure is 25% above the estimated $48 billion
budget for FY 08.  It is quite probable that this total figure was not even
known by the government until recently.  Greater control and oversight of the
Intelligence Community budget was a hallmark of the Intelligence Reform Act
of 2004 that created the position of the Director of National Intelligence
and gave it the mandate to get an overview of the entire amount spent on
intelligence government-wide.  To this end, the Office of the Director of
National Intelligence has recently gathered all parts of the previously
fragmented Intelligence Community budget together for the first time as part
of its Intelligence Resource Information System (IRIS).   In the report from
the Select Senate Committee on Intelligence released last Thursday, the
committee praised the Office of the Director of Intelligence for creating a
"single budget system called the Intelligence Resource Information System."
It also recognizes their efforts in helping create what "will be used for
further inquiry by the Committeebs budget and audit staffs and will be a
baseline that allows the Congress and DNI to derive trend data from future
reports."   

Earlier, lower estimates were most likely only included what fell directly
under the Director of Central Intelligence and which would have omitted parts
of NSA, NRO.  A total Intelligence Community number, with the Intelligence
Community as defined by 50 U.S.C. 401a(4), would also now include the various
military intelligence services (e.g. Army Intel, Navy Intel, etc.), each with
its respective weapon technology intelligence exploitation shop.   A total
budget would also include a large portion of the budget of the Department of
Homeland Security which was previously fragment across multiple government
agencies.  A $60 billion government-wide Intelligence Community budget is not
at all out of line with the post 9/11 organizational reality.  It seems that
the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is just now getting a
clear picture of the fragmented intelligence community budget. 

The overall Intelligence Community budget has long been a well kept secret
and this classification did once have relevance when a large shift in the
budget could have indicated to the Soviets an addition or cancellation of a
major defense program.  Now that our greatest adversaries are stateless
entities that run on a shoestring budget and strike soft targets, signals of
changes in high-dollar defense systems hardly seem worth hiding.
Nonetheless, the federal government has frequently gone to court to keep the
amount of the national intelligence budget secret.  Only the budgets for
1963, 1997 and 1998 have been officially revealed, largely in response to
FOIA lawsuits.  And in 2005 a US News reporter picked up an apparent slip of
the tongue by an official of the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence at a conference when it was stated the national intel budget was
$44 billion, but it was not clear which fiscal year this was in reference to
and the DNI refused to confirm if the figure was accurate or the release
accidental. At this time, they would not have had total dollar figures
through the new IRIS system.  But with such a staggering budget, it does seem
that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence would be well
advised to find some room in the Intelligence Community budget for a staff
training on PowerPoint and OPSEC.

Technorati Tags: contractors, Defense Intelligence Agency, DIA, Director of
National Intelligence, DNI, intelligence budget, intelligence community

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Posted by R J Hillhouse on June 03, 2007 in CIA, Private intel corporations,
Spies, War on Terror | Permalink