Reformers Turn Up the Heat on the FBI

Pressure to overhaul the FBI mounted Tuesday when House budget negotiators ordered the bureau to embrace the recommendations of a presidential commission on intelligence failures that would likely erode the FBI’s independence.

The powerful House Appropriations Committee acted a day after a former member of another commission, the bipartisan panel that investigated the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, expressed concern that the FBI had failed to make sufficient progress in recasting itself since the attacks in New York and at the Pentagon.

Tuesday’s action by the normally supportive congressional committee, in language attached to an FBI budget bill, sends a blunt message to the bureau that lawmakers consider the progress to be unacceptable.

It sets up a battle as early as next week, when the House is expected to take up the Justice Department budget.

The presidential commission on intelligence failures had recommended a restructuring of the FBI under which thousands of counterterrorism and counterintelligence agents and analysts would be accountable to an outside agency under the intelligence reform law Congress approved last year.

Without the change, critics say, only a fraction of the bureau’s intelligence-related resources would be affected by the law.

An FBI spokesman declined comment on Tuesday’s action.

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III told a Senate committee last month that the bureau was reviewing the commission’s recommendations, saying the proposals made “a significant contribution to understanding ways we can improve our intelligence capabilities.”

But Mueller and other officials have also strongly defended the steps they have taken to remake the bureau after the Sept. 11 attacks, and were believed to be seeking more time to allow the moves to work before launching a more radical restructuring.

The Justice Department also declined comment.

But a former Justice Department official who has been tracking the proposals called the panel’s action “a shot across the bow” by the lawmakers who control the purse strings.

“You never [mess] with your budget guys -- even if they tell you to run naked down Pennsylvania Avenue,” said the former official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Even so, “I think the bureau will lobby like mad to get that knocked out.”

The Justice Department is conducting a review of the proposals from the commission, co-chaired by federal judge Laurence H. Silberman and former U.S. Sen. Charles S. Robb, and recently submitted recommendations to the White House.

The Bush administration is preparing final recommendations on how it would like to see the panel’s report carried out.

The panel, formally known as the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, produced a critique of America’s spy services.

It detailed the intelligence debacle before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, and concluded that the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies remained poorly coordinated and hidebound to change.

Justice Department officials are believed to have recommended that at least one of the commission’s proposals be adopted: creating a national security division within the department that would serve as a focal point for its terrorism-fighting efforts. But officials are believed to have recommended a less aggressive approach for the FBI.

Justice Department officials have declined comment on the specifics of their recommendations, which were described to The Times by people familiar with the process and who requested anonymity.

The congressional directive to the department, contained in a budget report made public Tuesday and prepared by a House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the FBI, does not carry the force of law. But the House Appropriations Committee, which provides the money for the government to operate, holds enormous sway over the agencies it funds.

In a report in March, the commission concluded that the bureau’s intelligence-related divisions were scattered. It recommended that the terrorism and counterintelligence division be combined with the bureau’s nascent intelligence arm in a new national security division.

Atop the division would sit a new senior-level official who would be accountable to an outsider, the new national intelligence director, John D. Negroponte.

Under the existing structure, the commission argued, the FBI’s top intelligence official had too little authority over the hiring and firing of the analysts and agents who collected threat information throughout the agency.

Making that official reportable to Negroponte would give the intelligence czar the control he needed to carry out U.S. policy, the commission said.

The recommendations of the Silberman-Robb commission were in sharp contrast to the findings last summer by the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission, which generally endorsed the actions taken by the bureau since the attacks.

On Monday, a former member of the Sept. 11 panel, Jamie S. Gorelick, who was a deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, signaled that the commission might be having second thoughts about its proposals, citing the FBI’s bungled upgrade of a critical computer system and problems in hiring enough intelligence specialists.

In its report released Tuesday, the House Appropriations subcommittee said the bureau had taken a number of steps to transform itself after Sept. 11, but said more needed to be done. The report was part of the fiscal 2006 FBI budget approved by the Appropriations Committee.

“As the next step in the FBI’s transformation the committee directs the attorney general to implement the recommendation of the commission ... to improve integration of the FBI’s counterterrorism and counterintelligence operational divisions,” the report said.

The FBI “needs to improve the mechanism by which intelligence analysis drives the activities of the intelligence collectors,” the report added.

The report ordered Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales to create a senior-level position in the FBI -- associate deputy director for national security -- to oversee the effort. It also ordered Gonzales to submit a report within 60 days of the budget being approved, detailing its actions to put into effect the commission’s recommendations.

The subcommittee’s chairman, Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.), a longtime supporter of the FBI and Mueller, could not be reached for comment Tuesday.

The $5.74-billion fiscal 2006 budget for the FBI reflects a 10% increase over the current year’s. At the same time, the budget trims funding that the FBI requested for additional staff from 2,044 positions to 1,629 positions, the subcommittee’s report said.

The panel said that although the bureau workforce had rapidly grown since the Sept. 11 attacks, investment in training and support had lagged. It decided that more funds should be directed in those areas.

Separately Tuesday, the Senate Intelligence Committee, roiling the debate over the anti-terrorism USA Patriot Act, approved legislation behind closed doors that would give the FBI the power to issue subpoenas in terrorism cases without judicial oversight, Democratic members of the committee said.

The Bush administration and the FBI have long sought the authority, but the issue took a back seat as the debate focused on whether Congress should reauthorize or scale back 16 provisions of the Patriot Act set to expire at the end of this year.

The move by the Senate Intelligence Committee illustrates support among some congressional Republicans for giving law enforcement all the tools they believe are necessary to fight the war on terrorism.

Critics of the law say the government has not made a case for expanding it or shown that terrorism investigations have gone awry because authorities lacked the power they are now seeking.