Leadership Quote by Charles Foster Bass

“Since 1998” does a lot of quiet work here. It’s a timestamp that doubles as an alibi: the implicit claim is not just that upgrades happened, but that they happened on this Administration’s watch, after a recognizable trigger point. In the late 1990s, U.S. weapons labs were roiled by espionage fears and political panic (think: China, nuclear secrets, and the kind of headlines that make “counterintelligence” suddenly sound like a kitchen-table issue). Bass’s line is built to reassure and to prosecute at the same time: reassure the public that something is being done, and prosecute the idea that prior stewardship was lax enough to require “begun to upgrade.”

The diction is deliberately bureaucratic. “Has begun” is an institutional soft-shoe: it signals motion without promising completion, outcomes, or measurable success. “Upgrade” frames security as a technical modernization project, not a reckoning with systemic vulnerabilities, cultural complacency, or bureaucratic turf wars inside the labs. And by bundling “counterintelligence and security,” the quote blurs two different agendas: catching spies versus tightening internal controls. That ambiguity is useful in politics, where sounding tough matters more than specifying tradeoffs.

Under the surface is a familiar governing move: convert a crisis into a management story. If the labs are symbols of national power, then “upgrading” them becomes a way to say the state is still competent, still in control, still worthy of trust, without stepping into the messy details that would invite accountability.