Intelligence Reform Bill Hits a Wall in Congress

A sweeping overhaul of the nation’s intelligence apparatus, one of the chief recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission, appeared headed for collapse Friday as House and Senate negotiators acknowledged they could not agree on a bill before next week’s elections.

Negotiators were unable to overcome opposition from the Pentagon and its supporters to creating a powerful intelligence czar, fearing that too much authority over the budgets and personnel of the intelligence agencies would be shifted away from the secretary of Defense.

“The initial hurdle we’re facing is the one that intelligence reformists have been facing for the last half-century,” said Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.). “How do you allow the Department of Defense to maintain some form of budget authority over the intelligence budget?”

The failure to rapidly reform the nation’s collection of intelligence agencies demonstrated the government’s difficulty in coming to grips with the fundamental problems that the terrorist attacks laid bare.

“The conferees have gone home, it seems like they are at an impasse, and I think it’s tragic that we don’t have legislation on the president’s desk before the election,” said Mary Fetchet, a member of a group of family members who lost relatives in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The group, the 9/11 Family Steering Committee, lobbied for creation of the Sept. 11 commission and has pushed Congress to adopt the panel’s recommendations. Fetchet said that her group would continue to press for a bill. “I don’t think we can lose hope, but it comes down to what the White House will do” to force an agreement, she said.

Nine days ago, when House and Senate negotiators opened talks to reconcile the legislation each chamber passed, they pledged to try to finish a bill before the elections.

It would take the pressure of elections, supporters of a bill said, to push through an overhaul that required shifting control of part of the intelligence budget from the Pentagon to a new entity. Currently, the Pentagon controls about 80% of the total intelligence budgets, a classified number thought to be around $40 billion per year.

The Senate bill would give a national intelligence director control over much of that budget. The House bill would have the intelligence budgets go through the Defense Department, with the national intelligence director’s concurrence.

On Friday, negotiators said they had made little progress in hundreds of hours of talks and remained far apart on key issues.

“The progress we have made has been slow; it is not definitive. We have not reached agreement,” said Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Ill.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and of the ad hoc House and Senate committee charged with producing a compromise bill.

Hoekstra said he was working on a proposal by House Republicans but acknowledged that it would not meet all the Senate’s concerns.

In a conference call with reporters Friday afternoon, the top four negotiators said they were disappointed with their inability to bridge the gaps. They said they would continue to work toward a bill that could be voted on during the lame duck session scheduled to convene Nov. 16.

Some critics complained that mixed signals from the White House had given the Pentagon and its supporters on Capitol Hill license to work against the reforms, dooming the effort.

Although the White House publicly urged Congress to quickly pass a bill creating a strong national intelligence director, it did not silence the Pentagon’s opposition or stop it from lobbying members of Congress.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who co-authored the Senate bill with Lieberman, said it was “very disappointing that we’ve been unable to negotiate an agreement.”

Collins, who has said she feared the legislation would die if it were not completed before the elections, said Friday she was “heartened” by the fact that the House and Senate negotiators agreed to keep trying.

But Congressional staff negotiators said they doubted there was enough common ground to reach agreement.

In addition to their dispute over the power of a national intelligence director, the House and Senate remain far apart on provisions in the House bill that would expand law enforcement powers and the government’s power to track, detain and quickly deport illegal immigrants.

It became clear Wednesday that agreement was impossible before the elections, staff members said.

Scott Palmer, chief of staff for House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill), told negotiators that a letter to House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter (R-El Cajon) last week from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff hit House negotiators “like a nuclear bomb.”

In the letter, Gen. Richard B. Myers said he thought that the more limited budget authority that the House wanted to grant a national intelligence director would better preserve the link between the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies. Hunter had solicited the letter from Meyers.

Hastert’s press secretary, John Feehery, said the House “could not vote for a bill that our members were not comfortable with and they were not going to vote for something that the Defense Department -- that is currently fighting a war -- was against.”

Asked whether the Myers letter undercut the White House’s stated support for a national intelligence director with strong budgetary authority, Feehery said that Hunter -- in soliciting the letter -- asked Myers “not to speak for the administration, but to give him his unvarnished opinion, to speak for the war fighters, which he is required by law to do.”

Led by Hunter, House Republicans insisted in negotiations that giving a national intelligence director too much budget authority would endanger U.S. troops, who often depend on real-time access to strategic intelligence information.

Hunter’s critics said he was fighting for turf -- that of the Pentagon and the congressional committees that oversee the Pentagon.

Hunter’s position was bolstered by an e-mail sent Oct. 23 to the staffs of Sens. Collins and Lieberman by Philip D. Zelikow, who served as executive director of the Sept. 11 commission.

In an apparent miscalculation, Zelikow praised the House for being willing to compromise with the Senate on the question of budget authority for the national intelligence director and urged the Senate to close a deal. He said afterward he was trying to break the impasse. But Senate negotiators said it served to harden the House’s position.

“The Zelikow e-mail hurt a lot,” said a congressional staff negotiator. “It was widely perceived by the supporters of intelligence reform on the Hill as the single thing that really killed us.”

The Senate was convinced that it had the upper hand going into this month’s negotiations with the House. It had moved quickly, enacting a bill in early October by a 96-2 vote. Hailed as an example of bipartisan cooperation, it won support from the Sept. 11 commission, the families who had lobbied for creation of the panel, House Democrats and, with some caveats, the White House.

But the House took a different course when the Republican leadership crafted a bill that Democrats said gave too little power to a national intelligence director and included anti-immigrant provisions.