WASHINGTON, May 4 (UPI) -- The House Intelligence Committee has issued its annual authorization bill in an effort to reduce the dependence of U.S. intelligence on emergency spending.
The bill, which authorizes Fiscal Year 2008 spending on intelligence by all U.S. agencies and the military in a classified annex, was passed Wednesday by the committee after Republicans tried unsuccessfully to remove several provisions.
Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, said in a statement that in a departure from previous practice, the bill would also include authorizations for the supplemental spending request expected from the administration later this fiscal year.
"In past years, this committee has complained about its inability to review so-called emergency supplemental funding bills put forward by the executive branch outside of the normal budget process," said Reyes.
Reyes said that by including the emergency spending, "We are bringing an unprecedented level of oversight to the supplemental request -- and ... shifting a large amount of money from the supplemental into the base budget."
"This is, in my view, responsible budgeting -- because it allows intelligence officers in the field to plan their operations properly, particularly in the counterterrorism arena," Reyes concluded.
Ranking GOP committee member Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., said the bill contained "several questionable items," including what he said in a statement were "deep cuts to classified CIA programs designed to help America fight and succeed in the conflict against radical jihadists."
Republicans unsuccessfully sought to strip what they called a $40 million earmark for a drug intelligence center, which the president's budget recommended be closed.
The National Drug Intelligence Center, based in the congressional district of senior Democratic appropriator Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., was slammed as a "Clinton-era pork boondoggle," by Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich.
