Hearing of the Senate Committee on Intelligence - DNI Authorities and Personnel Issues

Interview

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SEN. WYDEN: Mr. Director, out of deference to the chairman I admire very much, I'm going to set aside questions that I had planned to ask about the last couple of days, and let me start then with respect on the authority question, just in matters of fiscal responsibility. And what I've long been concerned about is that there's a habit in the intelligence community of beginning these very large acquisition programs, and nobody's really quite sure how to pay for them down the road. And I think you've been concerned about this as well, and you've talked about a variety of strategies that you've been interested in, including auditable financial statements and a variety of things. But what have you been able to accomplish thus far to make sure that the intelligence community doesn't spend these huge sums of money on these major acquisitions that are going to later have to be cancelled on the grounds that they're unaffordable and in effect don't give you value for the dollar that you're allocate.

ADM. MCCONNELL: Yes, sir. Excellent question. Something I'm very concerned about and focused on. Let me capture sort of three areas of interest with acquisition where we get ourselves sin trouble. The first is requirements creep. We're going to design something, build something, whatever. And then as we go through the process, everybody wants to add another capability, another capability. So all of a sudden, it becomes unaffordable. The schedule slips or we have a major problem. So we have to do a better job in containing requirements creep.

The second thing is we lost a generation of program mangers. When the dot boom occurred in the '90s, many of the people with the skill sets had built large systems were attracted to private sector and we left. So we suffered from an inadequate supply of professional program managers. So we recognized that, and we're trying to rebuild that capability.

Another part of it is having realistic cost estimating. The idea is don't start something you can't afford. Now, if we can do that -- and we established the new deputy on our staff, deputy for acquisition, someone experienced -- 30 more years in industry -- to work through these issues, and now -- had decisions.

As you're aware, we had a program that was multibillion dollars that was putting us in a position of being a one-point failure. And so we took that on as a community. And my ex-commandant (?) mentioned earlier, we took it to all of the parties that had to make a decision and finally took it to the president for a decision for coordination with the Hill. Now, that I think gets us back into focusing in an area looking at the architecture, what's affordable, how would you manage it, and we started a process we called ICA, Intelligence Collection Architecture, that's to force us to look at the discipline, the cost, and the schedule so that we will choose things that are affordable in the best interest of the nation.

So I feel like we're making progress. But one of the things that I would ask your support on -- currently your bill or the bill for this office gave me authorities for a streamline acquisition. The problem is you didn't give me the authority to delegate them to anybody that spends money. So while the DCI and the director of Central Intelligence have special authorities to do special things can take risks that can go fast, and you gave it to me -- it's only for my staff and not for the rest of the community. I need that authority for the rest of the community.

SEN. WYDEN: And I'm sympathetic to that. Let me ask you about something that came up in an open hearing not long ago that my constituents just were kind of slack-jawed when they heard about it, and it goes to, again, the question of your authorities with respect to the problem. At one of the open hearings we had lost fall, Willie Huen (ph), a senior FBI official, acknowledged that a large number of FBI agents and analysts don't have access to the Internet at their desk. And committee staff have found that there were similar access problems existing for the FBI's top-secret system, particularly for the offices overseas. And you and I have talked about technology in the past, and I know you have a great interest in this. What can you do with your authorities to in effect address something that I think just defies common sense.

ADM. MCCONNELL: In this case, I can offer to help, and we've done. We've put technical people into the process to help to think it through and do requirements and that sort of thing. And I have some budget authority. Now, it's much more clearly defined, understood, and in action for the agencies that are in the Defense Department. It's less clearly defined for agencies outside the Defense Department. So we're -- that's something we recognize and we're working through it. And let me just make one other point so you'll capture this. On the executive committee that we've established to run the community, the director of the FBI is now a member of that. He participates actively and he is now benefiting from some of this deliberative process. So I think we'll make that matter.

SEN. : Chairman?

SEN. : Thank you very much. I annoyed the former owner of the meager territories of West Virginia, the honorable senior senator from West Virginia by pointing out that we're having more votes at 4:30 and that's not much time. So now we have three more people who wish to speak and they're probably not even going to get a full five minutes. So Senator Feinstein --

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