Intelligence_ From Secrets to Policy - Mark M. Lowenthal [155]
The centrality of the budget to oversight should be obvious. In reviewing the president’s budget submission and crafting alternatives or variations, Congress gets to examine the size and shape of each agency, the details of each program, and the plans for spending money over the next year. No other activity offers the same degree of access or insight. Moreover, given the constitutional requirement for congressional approval of all expenditures, in no other place does Congress have as much leverage as in the budget process.
Critics of the annual budget process argue that it not only gives Congress insights and power but also subjects the executive to frequent fluctuations in funding levels, given that they can vary widely from year to year. Every executive agency dreams of having multiyear appropriations or no year appropriations—that is, money that does not have to be spent by the end of the fiscal year. Although some funds are allocated in these ways, Congress resists doing so on a large scale, because such a move would fundamentally undercut its power of the purse. (Appropriated funds that are not spent at the end of a fiscal year are returned to the Treasury. Each agency keeps careful watch over its spending to ensure that it spends all allocated funds by the end of the fiscal year. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) also monitors agencies’ spending rates throughout the fiscal year to ensure that they are not spending either too quickly or too slowly.)
Congress has, in recent years, used supplemental appropriations bills with increasing frequency for intelligence. Basically, supplemental appropriations make available to agencies funds over and above the amount originally planned. In the case of an unforeseen emergency the requirement for a supplemental bill is easily understood. But when supplementals are used on a recurring basis—perhaps annually—they become problematic. Supplemental appropriations are single-year infusions of money. Although no guarantee is made for the size of any appropriation from year to year, supplementals are seen as being riskier in terms of the likelihood that they will be used again. Thus, if a crucial activity is being funded by supplemental appropriations, it may be necessary in the following year either to terminate the activity for lack of funds or to curtail some other activity in the budget (called “taking it out of hide”). Clearly, agencies would prefer to have the supplemental funds included in the base—that is, added to their regular budget, so they can plan more effectively for the ensuing years. Congress has been unwilling to do this, largely as a means of controlling growth, despite the effect that repeatedly passing supplementals has had on programs. The use of supplementals has become so regular that both Congress and executive agencies plan for them at the beginning of a budget cycle.
The budget gives Congress power over intelligence. In the 1980s, for example, Congress used the intelligence budget to restrict Reagan administration policy in Nicaragua, passing a series of amendments, sponsored by the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Edward P. Boland, D-Mass., that denied combat-support funds for the contras. Efforts to circumvent these restrictions led to the Iran-contra scandal.
HEARINGS. Hearings are essential to the oversight process as a means of requesting information from responsible officials and obtaining alternative views from outside