Politics & Power Quote by Roger Wicker

Wicker’s sentence is built like a budget memo, but it’s really a permission slip. It begins by summoning a familiar cast of adversaries - “other countries and terrorist organizations” - a pairing that deliberately blurs two very different threats into one continuous menace. That rhetorical bundling does quiet work: if the danger is everywhere and amorphous, then the response can be expansive, and the question shifts from “Should we?” to “How much?”

The phrase “secure information” is telling. It avoids vivid verbs like “steal” or “hack,” which might invite scrutiny about capability, attribution, or policy failures. “Secure” sounds clinical, almost bureaucratic, and it implies sophistication on the enemy’s side. The target, meanwhile, is “information that could threaten national security,” a conditional so broad it can cover everything from weapons designs to embarrassing cables to domestic dissent miscast as risk. “Could” doesn’t describe a plot; it describes a horizon of anxiety.

Then comes the real action: “more funding is provided in the bill.” The passive voice turns a choice into an inevitability. No agent, no debate, just funding materializing as if demanded by the facts themselves. In the post-9/11, great-power-competition era, this is the standard legislative move: convert fear into appropriations, wrap it in the language of prudence, and treat counter-intelligence as the one area where saying “slow down” sounds like negligence. The subtext is simple: expansion is responsibility, and oversight is a secondary luxury.