The High Costs of Cutting Intelligence Spending

The United States’ annual budget deficit is nearing $2 trillion, and the national debt exceeds $36 trillion. This kind of federal spending is unprecedented outside of times of war or depression, and spending like this while maintaining comparatively low rates of taxation is entirely unprecedented.

President Donald Trump has vowed to cut trillions from the budget, and in the first month of his new term his administration has offered legally dubious deferred resignations to government workers, begun laying off probationary employees and made other cuts that have garnered attention—while doing little to affect overall spending. Further, spending on entitlement programs, national defense, veterans benefits, and interest on the debt makes up 70 percent of the $7 trillion budget. So, where to cut?

One target is the intelligence community budget, which is $102 billion annually. There are 18 agencies in the intelligence community; about three-quarters of this amount goes to the nine civilian organizations in the IC, and one-quarter to nine military intelligence organizations.

Anyone who has spent time in both the public and the private sectors knows that the government too often wastes taxpayers’ money, and the IC is no exception to this rule. But the intel community is not the wisest place to make steep budget cuts. I spent 30 years as an active duty or reserve military intelligence officer, six years as a CIA case officer, and four years as a congressional staffer or administration appointee involved in some way with intelligence matters. In that time, I observed how investing in good intelligence can save both U.S. taxpayers’ money as well as American lives. 

The most obvious way is through preventing surprise attacks or acts of terrorism. Less obvious are helping to inform the secretary of the treasury’s and federal reserve chairman’s financial and monetary policymaking through intelligence on their foreign counterparts’ plans. Good intelligence also aids the diplomacy of the secretary of state and U.S. trade representative on economic matters through reporting on their foreign counterparts’ negotiating positions. World War II would at a minimum have gone on much longer, and might even have had a different result, had Allied signals intelligence not cracked German and Japanese codes. The Pentagon saved billions of dollars during the Cold War through accurate CIA human intelligence reporting from Soviet sources on the capabilities (or lack thereof) of different kinds of Eastern bloc weapons systems, stolen secrets that helped guide our own military’s procurement decisions.

Conversely, a lack of actionable intel can come at a terrible cost in both blood and treasure. The country and the world would be very different places today if American military and naval intelligence had detected a Japanese fleet lurking off Oahu, a German army ready to punch through the snowy Ardennes forest, and a Chinese one about to cross the frozen Yalu River, and the Viet Cong silently preparing to violate the Tet ceasefire. Better FBI counterintelligence would have greatly delayed the Soviets in developing the atom and hydrogen bombs during the Cold War, and later discovered an al-Qaeda suicide cell training to strike here in the homeland. Better CIA collection and analysis would not have fallen for the grand strategic deception that Saddam Hussein possessed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. More and earlier intel about a leak at a communist Chinese biological warfare research lab in Wuhan might have helped save the lives of some of the 1 million Americans who perished in the recent pandemic. 

Intelligence officers, especially the human intelligence case officers who recruit and run spies, are themselves very expensive to recruit, vet, and train. A typical “pipeline” for a CIA case officer might go like this: After a year of processing, a trainee is hired out of college, grad school, or the military (or both). He or she spends several months to two years doing staff work at CIA headquarters before heading to the Field Tradecraft Course (aka “the Farm”) for about half a year. This might be followed by more months of paramilitary and/or extra surveillance detection training. Which in turn may be followed by up to two years of language training. And finally, there is training to appear credible to a foreign counterintelligence service in their overseas cover job.

Perhaps the instructors were just boosting our already-considerable egos, but I remember being told when we finished the Farm that we were the most expensively trained federal personnel after astronauts, fighter pilots, and nuclear submariners. Firing fledgling case officers during or shortly after they complete their training pipeline is a serious waste of time, effort, and money.

President Jimmy Carter and his CIA director, Adm. Stansfield Turner, fired nearly 200 case officers in 1977, after the congressional Church and Pike committees and the executive branch’s Rockefeller Commission uncovered Vietnam-era abuses by the intelligence community. Not surprisingly or unreasonably, the ax reputedly fell most heavily on officers whose areas of geographic specialization seemed least needed at that time. I’ve often wondered if officers let go in 1977 might have warned President Carter about the possibility of Iranian students seizing the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, or other foreign calamities that befell his administration. We’ll never know.

Presidents tend not to anticipate where foreign policy crises may arise four or eight years out. I’ll bet George W. Bush wasn’t thinking about Afghanistan on the campaign trail in 2000. Nor was George H.W. Bush thinking about Iraq invading Kuwait, Ronald Reagan about hostages in Lebanon, or Harry Truman about Korea when they ran for the presidency. Yet events in those countries ended up in some ways dominating their terms in office. Unfortunately, intelligence officers cannot master a hard language, familiarize themselves with another country, build operational covers, and develop a network of vetted sources with good access to secret intelligence overnight. Those capabilities need to be developed well in advance by a competent foreign intelligence service.

There are savings to be had in the intelligence community. While there is an intellectual benefit to competitive analyses, 17 different intel agencies, plus an Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) with five mission centers underneath it, is just too many cooks in the kitchen. Consolidating sole responsibility for certain missions within the IC to individual agencies would be helpful. Think of the amount of unnecessary duplication that goes on in the armed services with just five uniformed branches: The IC’s 17 subordinate agencies could certainly pool some administrative, logistical, and security functions, perhaps within the ODNI. 

Twenty years on from the creation of the ODNI, its authorities and the counterintelligence, counterproliferation, counterterrorism, cybersecurity and foreign malign influence centers that fall under it remain less than clear-cut. They arguably duplicate the analytical work that takes place at the intel agencies from which they draw most of their personnel. Either empower new Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard to actually direct the intel community by giving her the authority to hire, fire, and promote senior agency officials, and reallocate budget resources within the IC, or else do away with the position altogether.

As recently as 2001, the U.S. government had a budget surplus. Federal spending since then has grown out of control, including spending on counterterrorism, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the 2008 financial crisis, and the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. 9/11 and the wars that followed could have been prevented through better intelligence, and the devastation wrought by the pandemic might have been mitigated. Uncle Sam needs to cut back and tighten his belt. But the intelligence community budget isn’t the best place to begin to do it.