The 2010 elections were marked by the rise of the Tea Party faction within the Republican Party, which was a backlash to Obama’s presidency. Driven by their victories, the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives, and the newly elected Tea Party members made it a point of pride to be even more purposefully disruptive than the previous Congress.
The bright spot for the Intelligence Community, amid so much dysfunction on the Hill, was the January 2011 appointment of representatives Mike Rogers and Dutch Ruppersberger as, respectively, the chair and ranking member of the Intelligence Committee in the House. They were determined to set aside partisan politics and do what they believed best for the IC and for the nation, even if their actions drew the ire of their respective parties. When in 2015 I presented an award to them on behalf of an intelligence industry association, I said I’d been told that sometimes on a single issue, Ruppersberger, the Democrat, would be taking heat from the Obama White House at the same time that Rogers, the Republican, was under attack for supporting the White House.
Rogers and Ruppersberger introduced an authorization bill for 2011 in February—nearly halfway through the fiscal year—and worked with Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein and Vice Chair Saxby Chambliss to get it to the president’s desk. President Obama signed it on June 8. Subsequently, Rogers and Ruppersberger worked with the Senate Intelligence Committee to pass authorization bills for each of the next four years, which they served together. Thanking them on behalf of the IC in 2015, I joked, “In their four years as HPSCI leaders, they passed five intelligence authorization bills—five annual authorization bills—in four years. That really only works with congressional math.”
On the appropriations side, however, the math was not working. Democrats and Republicans seemed to concur that federal spending was unsustainable, but couldn’t agree on much else. So in 2010, for the fifth straight year, they failed to pass an appropriations bill by October 1. On September 29, two days before a potential shutdown, Congress passed a continuing resolution, funding the government through December 3. The next CR went through December 18, with successive ones coming on December 21, March 4, March 18, April 8, and then April 15. None of those continuing resolutions was passed with more than two days to spare before the previous resolution expired, and some were passed only a few hours before the government would have to shut down. Because agencies in the executive branch required days of preparation for a shutdown, across the government we had to prepare, again and again, to close up shop.
Seven times between December 2010 and April 2011, we canceled training and called people back from travel. Seven times, we started procedures for closing down infrastructure systems. More than once, we got so close to shutdown that NSA prepared to phase down some nonurgent systems related to signals intelligence. Seven times, we notified employees they were hours from being furloughed, sent home without pay for as long as the government remained unfunded. Instructions from the Office of Personnel Management complicated the situation, as we were required to divide employees into two groups: those whose work was “essential” to keep the government from actually collapsing (which included such positions as security guards protecting our facilities, analysts monitoring terrorists trying to board airliners, officers deployed to combat zones in support of warfighters, and, of course, people who could answer whatever questions Congress had as they debated passing a budget), and those whose work was allegedly “nonessential” (including, for example, acquisition professionals who made sure satellites were delivered on time and within budget, officers who coordinated with foreign intelligence services, recruiters who hired new intelligence officers, and the human resources folks who made sure we all got paid). The actual policy document uses the words “excepted” and “nonexcepted,” but it was all communicated to employees as “essential” and “nonessential.”
It was demoralizing for intelligence professionals to be characterized as nonessential and then threatened with the possibility of not being paid. Media headlines repeatedly asked: If those people were nonessential, why did we employ them in the first place? The news for essential employees was actually worse, as they would have to work without pay. After previous government shutdowns, Congress had passed a bill retroactively remunerating people for time they missed, but the Tea Party Republicans indicated publicly they would now block any retroactive payments.
At the end of the workday on Friday, April 15, 2011, Congress hadn’t reached a deal to pass a budget or a new continuing resolution, and we expected to shut down at midnight. We informed people definitively whether they were “essential” or “nonessential.” We told the nonessential employees to take home any medication they had at work, or anything else critical to their personal lives. By some miracle, though, Congress managed to pass an actual appropriation for the remainder of the fiscal year, and we remained open. In fact, we needed our chief financial officer and her staff to come in to work on the weekend to figure out how the enacted appropriations affected the Intelligence Community. It was actually good news for the NIP, which was given a $1.5 billion increase—our last up-year in the post-9/11 streak—but the MIP saw a $3 billion reduction for its Fiscal Year 2011 funding. Because April 15 was more than halfway through the year, and we’d been told to operate under the assumption of the previous year’s funding levels, programs funded under the MIP had the remainder of the year to absorb the $3 billion cut, rather than a full year. So instead of an 11 percent cut over a full year, it was a 24 percent cut over five and a half months. As my dad would’ve said, “This is no way to run a railroad.”
This was just the start of the 2011 drama. The United States is one of only a handful of nations that sets a limit on how much money its government can borrow, and other nations that do either fix their debt ceiling as a percentage of their GDP, so that it naturally rises over time, or set a hard limit so high that they don’t worry about ever reaching it. In contrast, the US Congress regularly has to raise the ceiling for the amount of money the US Treasury is allowed to owe in bonds. After 9/11, Congress quietly raised the debt ceiling in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2006, 2007, twice in 2008, twice in 2009, and again in 2010, to $14.294 trillion. Shortly after Congress passed a budget on April 15, 2011, all eyes turned to August 2, which the US Treasury had identified as the date when it would reach the debt ceiling limit and be unable to issue more bonds.
The Tea Party Republicans in the House, in particular, saw this as another opportunity to “play chicken” with the federal government in pursuit of their agenda. Republicans wanted cuts to domestic entitlements, particularly social safety-net programs like welfare, food stamps, and Medicaid. Democrats wanted to raise taxes on wealthy Americans. Republicans were set against any increases in taxes and wanted to protect national security equities. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner pointed out the real absurdity of the debate: If the government didn’t raise the ceiling to borrow more money, it would default on government bonds. Then, almost certainly, the international credit indexes would downgrade the United States’ credit rating, and the interest rates the government paid on bonds would go up. If neither side swerved before Tuesday, August 2, not only could we see a government shutdown, but annual federal spending would increase hundreds of billions of dollars just to cover interest payments, with no tangible benefit for taxpayers.
On Monday, August 1, with this national theater of the absurd playing out in Washington, the Intelligence Community leadership left town for the day. Stephanie and I met the directors of the “Big Six”—CIA, NSA, NRO, NGA, DIA, and FBI—along with USD(I) Mike Vickers and key members of each agency staff at an “undisclosed location” to discuss what we were going to do. Regardless of what happened with the debt ceiling that week, our days of ever-increasing intelligence budgets were probably over.
Heading into that meeting, I believed that, to most IC agency heads and to most of our workforce, my oft-repeated phrase “intelligence integration” meant coordinating
across agency lines to bring tradecraft from all the intelligence disciplines together. Three months earlier, to the day, outstanding intelligence work by CIA, NSA, and NGA had led to the raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and the death of Osama bin Laden. That was intelligence integration built on work that had been under way long before I became DNI.
In the summer of 2011, facing decreasing budgets across the board, IC leaders realized we needed to extend the same spirit of integration to our business processes because we were staring once again into the abyss of a potential shutdown and the certainty of losing resources across the community, which would potentially impact the safety and security of the nation, its citizens, and our allies.
In a somber room, we discussed the realities we faced. Our budgets had increased at a somewhat similar rate to the defense budget since 2001, but our mission imperatives had expanded at the same rate. We’d not only discovered and disrupted terrorist plots around the world; we were supporting active wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, protecting troops from insurgent attacks and IEDs, and giving them intelligence to go on the offensive. At the same time, China and Russia still challenged us, and North Korea and Iran both were pushing to become internationally recognized nuclear states. That spring, I’d told our congressional oversight committees that we must “sustain a robust, balanced array of intelligence capabilities to cope with the wide variety and scope of potential threats.” Despite these expanding requirements, the direction from Congress and the public was for us to “trim the fat.”
At our off-site, the agency directors and their chief finance officers opened their books to each other to an unprecedented degree. They revealed—in real numbers—how much they were spending on specific missions and programs. It quickly became apparent that each agency had already spent the past year or more identifying efficiencies within their own systems, and that there was very little overlap between two agencies performing similar enough functions that we could feel safe eliminating one and allowing it to be covered by another. I know that skeptics won’t buy this, but while many IC programs were very expensive, almost all served a unique purpose within our expanded mission, and there was almost no fat to trim.
I finally spoke out loud what I believed everyone was thinking: We weren’t going to be able to, as the cliché goes, “do more with less.” Saying we could accept these cuts without significant impact would be intellectually dishonest, misrepresenting the facts to our stakeholders and policy makers. So, I told the group, we would “do less with less.” That did not mean salami slicing—taking a percentage cut from every program, so that we continued doing the same things but with impaired capabilities—so we agreed to plan as a community to prioritize resources according to the strategies the national intelligence managers in ODNI had been coordinating. We would make hard choices and kill off entire programs and capabilities, and we’d keep funding critical programs at the levels they needed to function properly. As Stephanie deftly put it, “Flat is the new up.” We also agreed that “sunk costs” are lost costs—we’d only keep a program because it met mission needs, not just because we’d already invested a large sum of money in it.
As I write this, I can imagine readers thinking that making necessary adjustments in response to cost-cutting measures sounds remarkably obvious. At the time, however, seriously considering intentionally killing a government program to save money felt pretty radical. One of my favorite quotes, which I used again and again over the next few years, was from a New Zealand physicist, Ernest Rutherford, who once remarked, “We’re running out of money, so we must begin to think.” Later, Stephanie revised Rutherford’s quote to say, “So we must begin to think together.”
We decided first and foremost to protect our future. That meant, as we froze—and perhaps later even cut—the overall size of the IC workforce, we’d keep a hiring pipeline open to bring in new people with fresh ideas and experiences. It also meant we’d protect our investment in science and technology. Under Dawn Meyerriecks’s leadership from ODNI, the chief scientists and research directors of the IC had already formulated how to manage research investment. In some areas, like cryptanalysis, we would continue to lead the world, while in others we would support industry research to ensure we could use their resulting products. In many, many other areas, we would have to leverage what industry was already producing, using “adapt” or “adopt” as our primary principles.
We also agreed to coordinate any cuts we made to the NIP with cuts made to the MIP, so that we could avoid inadvertently creating a serious vulnerability, what could be called “programming fratricide.” For that reason, it was crucial that USD(I) Mike Vickers was at the table, and I was grateful when, a month later, Mike invited us to a similar MIP-focused off-site. We’d come a long way from the turf battles of a few years before.
The final—again rather obvious—principle we agreed to was favoring capabilities for conducting intelligence over support functions. Marilyn Vacca, the person most responsible for executing the DNI’s authority to determine the NIP, told the group that 20 to 25 percent of our budget request was coded for information technology. IT was so expensive because each of the agencies had developed its own separate and secure infrastructure, network, email system, support services, and user experience. Their respective IT leaders and chief information officers had built interagency bridges to connect the archipelago, but each maintained its own island. I asked Al Tarasiuk, a deeply experienced CIA senior officer on rotation as the ODNI chief information officer, to develop an approach on how we could first bring all the agencies, and eventually the smaller intelligence components, into a single, united “IC IT Enterprise.” Al’s first contribution was to pronounce “IC ITE” as “eyesight.” No program has any cachet in Washington until it has a catchy acronym.
On Tuesday, August 2, the day after our off-site and—once again—the last possible day to avert disaster, Congress passed the Budget Control Act of 2011, and the president signed it into law. The act raised the debt ceiling by $900 billion and cut spending by $917 billion total over ten years, almost all of it back-loaded to the final few years—again kicking the can down the road. It also established a “supercommittee” of six Republicans and six Democrats tasked with cutting another $1.5 trillion. To show how serious Congress was about this supercommittee, the act carried a provision that if the supercommittee didn’t agree on a way to cut at least another $1.2 trillion, it would trigger a “sequestration” cut, indiscriminately slashing the domestic programs the Democrats cared about and the national security programs the Republicans cared equally about—$600 billion from each side. The law was deliberately cast to make these cuts as painful as possible. Triggering sequestration would not only result in these mindless, draconian, automatic cuts, but would specify that departments and agencies would have to take the cuts to all their programs, leaving directors and secretaries no discretion to move around money to save vital systems and capabilities. Essentially, Congress wrote the Budget Control Act of 2011 to force the supercommittee to negotiate, because in their minds, literally anything the supercommittee might come up with would be better than triggering sequestration, which they described as “unthinkable.” As we read about this deal, Stephanie correctly observed that much of what we’d accomplished with our off-site meeting would be completely undone if sequestration took place.
After August 2, 2011, the noise of Washington political chaos quieted enough for us to focus on the chaos of the rest of the world for a while. The Libyan civil war was reaching its endgame. The battle of Tripoli began on August 19, Gaddafi was captured and killed on October 20, and NATO ended its mission on October 31. The Iraq War officially ended (or so we thought) with the final withdrawal of US troops on December 18. Almost immediately, the insurgency forces in Iraq regenerated.
Before that, on October 17, I rolled out IC ITE at the 2011 GEOINT Symposium in San Antonio, and in December, Al Tarasiuk presented us with the plan he and the agency CIOs had come up wit
h. The agencies had competitively agreed to lead individual efforts for IC ITE. CIA and NSA won separate bids to provide cloud computing power. DIA and NGA had bid together to provide desktop hardware and a virtual desktop and interface. In addition to hosting a cloud, NSA would make computing accessible and powerful by making available thousands of mission applications through an “app mall.” Later, agencies would bid again to lead the longer-term challenge of consolidating IT network infrastructures with all of the associated issues of fiber, routers, and switches. To implement this plan, the agencies agreed not to cut their IT budgets through fiscal years 2012 and 2013. Over the following months, Al Tarasiuk would lead the technical effort, and Stephanie would lead the agency deputies committee to address systemic challenges and overcome the inevitable passive-aggressive resistance that such change inevitably engenders among agencies.
Unfortunately, as IC agencies were integrating in new ways, Congress was reaching new levels of disintegration. On November 21 the cochairs of the bipartisan congressional supercommittee published a statement that began, “After months of hard work and intense deliberations, we have come to the conclusion today that it will not be possible to make any bipartisan agreement available to the public before the committee’s deadline” of December 31. Still, no one panicked, for while sequestration had technically been triggered, it wouldn’t start until January 1, 2013, not 2012. Congress had another year to find a way out of the trap it had set for itself.
Facts and Fears Page 25