The intelligence community continues to face budget uncertainty given the current fiscal environment, playing “havoc” with planning and management, the nation’s top intelligence official said on Wednesday.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said he would be meeting Wednesday afternoon with the leaders of the government’s largest intelligence agencies to kick off planning for the 2017 budget but given the threat of budget sequestration in 2016, there remains “great uncertainty about its fate in Congress.”
In addition to the threat of sequestration, Clapper said the Budget Control Act caps that limit federal funding are in effect through 2021, which makes it difficult to plan across the intelligence community “when you don’t know what the budget situation is going to be.”
“And, of course, it has a huge impact on our most valuable asset, our workforce,” Clapper said at the second annual Intelligence and National Security Summit, which is co-hosted by AFCEA and the Intelligence and National Security Alliance. He said the intelligence community isn’t having a problem attracting new talent, and that attrition is relatively low, but that there are few openings given tight budgets.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has “earned its keep” the past four years in the budget “cut environment” on where it needs to trim and invest, Clapper said. The top priority for investment is protecting the workforce, he said.
Clapper said there are about 30 major systems acquisitions across the intelligence community, noting that it “plays havoc when you don’t know what the budget situation is going to be.”
Every year, Clapper said, he tells Congress that in all his years of intelligence service he can’t recall a period worse than it is now when it comes to challenging crises. What “I have tried to protect is global coverage,” he said.
Global coverage includes the bases and stations around the world that the CIA hosts for the intelligence community, Clapper said. He added that in the field, members of the community that come from various agencies “act as a team,” so much so that he no longer needs to remind them to do so in his talking points.
“We cannot possibly predict every single crisis that’s shown on a map so we have to be positioned where we observe, collect and understand” what’s going on.
The other piece of global coverage that needs to be sustained is a “robust…overhead collection architecture,” Clapper said, referring to satellite systems, “particularly for access to denied areas.”
Clapper also said that innovation and expanding the technological envelope are areas of emphasis.