WASHINGTON, April 10 (UPI) -- First of four parts
Newly confirmed Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell says he doesn't have the authorities he needs to lead the 16 agencies he oversees -- and that his office isn't properly structured to take best advantage of the authorities he does have.
At least he can fix the latter, and officials say he is trying to do so in a little-noticed redrawing of his office's organization chart last month.
"We don't have it right yet," McConnell told a conference of federal officials last week, speaking of the intelligence restructuring mandated by Congress in 2004.
As director of national intelligence, McConnell said, "I'm responsible for basically two things ... the budget for the 16 (U.S. intelligence agencies) and ensuring that no one breaks the law."
But, he added, 15 of those agencies, all save the CIA, are part of other Cabinet-level departments, and he lacks direct line management authority over them.
"I would submit that's a challenge. If you're going to dictate someone else's budget in another department and worry about compliance with the law and the regulations where you ... cannot hire or fire, it puts you in a challenging management condition," he said.
McConnell's chief of staff, David Shedd, told United Press International in an interview that a recently announced restructuring of the way the director's office was organized was designed to address those challenges.
One important change was the metamorphosis of Shedd's own job into the new post of director of the intelligence staff.
From his new perch he will convene regular meetings of a new executive committee, chaired by McConnell, on which will sit the Pentagon's intelligence chief, representatives of the departments of State, Treasury and Homeland Security, and the heads of the major intelligence agencies.
"The intent," said a statement from McConnell's office, "is to use the (executive committee) to initiate, change, and end programs, policies, and capabilities."
In his new post, Shedd will also directly oversee the work of the three officials who exercise the director's most significant authorities over the occasionally fractious collection of 16 agencies that insiders call the U.S. Intelligence Community.
The chief information officer, the chief personnel (or "human capital") officer and the chief financial officer all have significant policy authorities over, respectively, the information technology, staffing and budgets of the U.S. intelligence agencies.
Because they will all report to the staff director, who will convene and draw up the agendas for the executive committee, Shedd said, the committee will be a place in which the director can effectively drive forward his policy agenda in those three areas.
The committee will be "the nexus between those issues and the agency heads," said Shedd. McConnell, he added, "wants that lash-up to be close."
Two other important changes, Shedd said, were the creation of deputy director posts for acquisition and for policy, plans and requirements.
Last week McConnell said the ability of U.S. agencies "to purchase, procure (and) acquire large-scale systems," had "atrophied" during the 1990s, as U.S. spending on intelligence declined 40 percent, "and there was something called the dot (com) boom."
"Fungible skills inside the government, very sophisticated program management skills, engineering talent, information technology talent, was drawn out to industry where the jobs were more plentiful, so we lost a generation in our community in our ability to buy, purchase, with skill and acumen, large-scale systems," McConnell said.
"The track record (for big-ticket acquisitions) is spotty," acknowledged Shedd, saying the new acquisition post would ensure U.S. agencies were "more nimble and more agile, more responsive ... in applying technological innovations (when they appear) in the marketplace."
The official responsible for coordinating the community's research-and-development efforts to develop new technology, Eric Haseltine, would also be put under the new acquisition director, added Shedd, to "give him the additional (bureaucratic) heft (he needs) to be really creative."
He said the other new deputy post -- for policy, plans and requirements -- would effectively merge several jobs that had overseen the Intelligence Community's training, planning and security functions into the post currently held by Lt. Gen. Ron Burgess, currently the deputy director for customer outcomes and the official in the office who works most closely day-to-day with the agencies inside the Pentagon.
"First and foremost," said Shedd, the creation of the two new posts was designed to send "a message to the (community) that these issues have his personal attention and focus."
The changes to the office were also designed to make it easier to work with the Pentagon's intelligence chief, once that official, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Gen. James Clapper, was confirmed.
"I believe that neither the (director's office) nor the (undersecretary of defense for intelligence) staffs are organized optimally to promote efficient collaboration and coordination," Clapper said at his recent confirmation hearing. If confirmed, Clapper pledged, he would "restructure the organization of the (undersecretary of defense for intelligence) staff along functional lines," and "pattern (it) after the (director of national intelligence) staff, as McConnell intends to restructure it. This would help synchronize the Department of Defense intelligence components with the (director's office)."
Shedd confirmed that elements of the restructuring would be "finalized after consultation with the defense secretary."
McConnell indicated last week that the changes were only the beginning of a whole-scale re-evaluation of the intelligence reform that created his post.
"The debate that I'm going to initiate, in the time I'm in (office), is: Do we have (the structure of intelligence management) right?" he told last week's Excellence in Government conference. "My opinion so far is we need to adjust."
"More importantly," he added, a discussion is needed to address the question, "What should we do about (any shortcomings in the current structure)?"
He said that some people seemed content that his office lacked the authorities it needed over them. "That's a dialogue that some want to engage in and some do not."
"I don't yet have a formula for a set of recommendations," he concluded, "I just know what I'm experiencing in the first six or eight weeks."
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(Next: Martin Sieff will examine the challenges facing McConnell in trying to run the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies.)
