Politics & Power Quote by Leonard Boswell

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.