"The 9/11 Commission strongly recommends that the National Intelligence Director be fully in control of the budget, from developing it to implementing it, to ensuring that the National Intelligence Director has the clout to make decisions"
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Power in Washington is rarely about job titles; it is about who controls the money. Boswell’s line reads like bureaucratic housekeeping, but its intent is sharper: take intelligence coordination out of the realm of polite consensus and put it under a single executive hand with real leverage. “Fully in control of the budget” is the tell. After 9/11, the public story was about “failure to connect the dots.” The insider fix was about connecting the checkbooks.
Boswell is channeling the 9/11 Commission’s postmortem logic: fragmentation wasn’t just cultural, it was structural. Agencies guarded turf because their missions were funded separately, their loyalties split between the President, Congress, and their own institutional inertia. A National Intelligence Director without budget authority becomes a figurehead trying to conduct an orchestra that can ignore the baton. “From developing it to implementing it” insists on end-to-end command, closing the loophole where an office can propose reform but be sabotaged in execution by entrenched departments.
The subtext is a tacit indictment of the pre-9/11 arrangement: coordination was treated as a meeting, not a mandate. “Clout” is unusually blunt for congressional language, signaling that the real obstacle isn’t ignorance but resistance - bureaucratic, political, and interagency. In the post-attack climate, Boswell’s framing also functions as reassurance: if accountability failed, it will now be centralized. That promise carries its own tension, trading some pluralism and agency autonomy for a cleaner chain of command in the name of preventing catastrophe.
Boswell is channeling the 9/11 Commission’s postmortem logic: fragmentation wasn’t just cultural, it was structural. Agencies guarded turf because their missions were funded separately, their loyalties split between the President, Congress, and their own institutional inertia. A National Intelligence Director without budget authority becomes a figurehead trying to conduct an orchestra that can ignore the baton. “From developing it to implementing it” insists on end-to-end command, closing the loophole where an office can propose reform but be sabotaged in execution by entrenched departments.
The subtext is a tacit indictment of the pre-9/11 arrangement: coordination was treated as a meeting, not a mandate. “Clout” is unusually blunt for congressional language, signaling that the real obstacle isn’t ignorance but resistance - bureaucratic, political, and interagency. In the post-attack climate, Boswell’s framing also functions as reassurance: if accountability failed, it will now be centralized. That promise carries its own tension, trading some pluralism and agency autonomy for a cleaner chain of command in the name of preventing catastrophe.
Quote Details
| Topic | Decision-Making |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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