The role of the deputy procurement executive (PE) is to represent the DNI on IC contracting and procurement matters and to develop IC procurement policy and oversee IC contracting and procurement activities. The “DNI PE has fiduciary responsibility to monitor IC-wide procurement data,” Nielson emphasized.

In his presentation, "Intelligence Community Procurement Metrics: Needs, Goals and Approach,” Nielson explained that “contracting and procurement processes are key Intelligence Community Enterprise corporate services and essential enablers of the IC mission.”

And it’s an area over which “congressional oversight is intensifying," Nielsen said, noting: “Senior congressional leaders favor increased IC procurement data reporting.”

In particular, Nielson explained that IC contracting and procurement activities receiving increasing scrutiny from both the “DNI seniors and Congress” are due to “mounting [National Intelligence Program] budget pressures” and “non-IC contracting and procurement missteps.”

HSToday.us earlier reported that greater scrutiny of the intelligence community and its plethora of largely un-overseen classified programs was on the horizon.

Nielsen pointed out that in the previous Congress, Rep. Henry Waxman, now chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and Rep. David Obey, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, sponsored legislation that would have required procurement data reporting on classified data.

The bill would have required that “the Federal Procurement Data System … shall be modified, under the direction of the administrator for Federal Procurement Policy, to contain a classified annex. The annex shall contain the same information for classified contracts that is required for unclassified contracts.”

“Although intelligence-related procurement programs run into the tens of billions of dollars annually, they have never been subject to accountability and reporting requirements comparable to those for unclassified acquisition. This is expected to change,” Nielsen indicated, said Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy Director, Stephen Aftergood.

Baseline acquisition data-collection requirements were prescribed last year in Intelligence Community Directive (ICD) 105, which stated  that "all ... major system acquisitions shall have a [program management plan] that includes cost, schedule and performance goals, as well as program milestone criteria."

In a related matter, “the CIA has decided to trim its contractor staffing by 10 percent. It is the agency's first effort since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to curb what critics have decried as the growing privatization of US intelligence work, a circumstance that has sharply boosted some personnel costs,” the Washington Post reported .

It’s all part of Congress’ overall intent to begin overseeing more closely the IC’s use of contractors.

The Post reported that “contractors currently make up about one-third of the CIA workforce” and that CIA Director Michael V. Hayden has conceded that their work has not always been efficiently managed.

Associate Deputy Director Michael Morell said in an interview he does not think the CIA has become a revolving door, but "Director Hayden has said we don't want to become the farm team for contractors."

Morell said although CIA contractors do not supervise employees and are not allowed to make commitments on behalf of the government, “we do have contractors who do case-officer work, who are conducting operations" and who work alongside CIA career analysts.

Some lawmakers, especially those sitting on the intelligence committees who have lingering heartburn over certain post-9/11 IC contractor scandals, feel these historically in-house functions need to stay indoors.

The Senate intelligence committee “supports the DNI's efforts to survey and better understand the use of contractors in the Intelligence Community and was encouraged that the April 2007 report entitled ‘IC Core Contractor Inventory,’ provided a preliminary snapshot of the total number of full-time equivalent (FTE) contractors by expenditure center. The report is a good first step, but still more needs to be done.

During the 1990s, the IC experienced a decimating downsizing and was shackled with personnel restraints. Consequently, following the 9/11 attacks, the IC was forced to turn to its trusted old-boy network for staffing.

The agency’s woes were exacerbated under the Clinton administration. “Lawmakers were … surprised to learn that, largely under the radar, the Clinton administration had resumed the crusade begun in the 1970s. According to journalist and Bush critic James Risen, by the time the Clinton White House had finished with the CIA, “Morale [had] plunged to new lows, and the agency became paralyzed by an aversion to high-risk espionage operations for fear they would lead to political flaps,” wrote John C. Wobensmith & Jeff Smith in the current edition of “The Journal of International Security Affairs.”

“Less willing to take big risks, the CIA was less able to recruit spies in dangerous places such as Iraq,” Wobensmith and Smith wrote.

“Under both Democratic and Republican chairmen, the intelligence committees … transformed the CIA into the functional equivalent of the Department of Agriculture, preventing the agency from acting in a shrewd and, as is sometimes necessary, ruthless manner,” observed Stephen F. Knott in Congressional Oversight and the Crippling of the CIA .” Knott, an assistant professor at the Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia, is author of, “Secret and Santioned: Covert Operations and the American Presidency.”

By the mid-1970s, “the United States [had] granted its legislative branch the greatest control over intelligence matters of any Western nation and overturned the system which had prevailed in the United States since the Founding,” Knott wrote.

During the 1980s, spurred in large part by the Reagan administration’s covert wars in Central America and backdoor dealings with Iran in which the CIA was up to its neck in involvement, Congress exacted the final damaging blows on the agency as punishment.

By the 90s, the CIA had been denuded of its former glory, while responsible and effective oversight was allowed to languish. In fact, oversight was virtually non-existent for the better part of the decade President Clinton was in the Oval Office, and many beefs with the Republican Congress diverted GOP lawmakers’ attention away from the needs of the IC, despite the prescient warnings internally and in the form of both official and NGO studies of the decline in intelligence capabilities.

Islamist jihadism, meanwhile, was emerging as the new clear and present danger. But the intelligence corps had been so raped, chastized and ignored that its demoralization and resource deprivation had left it terribly ineffective.

The IC is still in recovery. In its report on the FY 2008 intelligence authorization bill, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) notes that “the DNI has asked for broad authority to manage the IC within the limits of available funds but without legislatively fixed civilian end-strength personnel limits” because “statutory ceilings have led to increased use of contractors and have hindered the IC's civilian joint duty, student employment, and National Intelligence Reserve Corps programs.”

The SSCI said it “will continue to study this recently received proposal,” but “in the meantime, the flexibility provided … by the use of full-time equivalents as a measure of personnel levels and the additional flexibility … should help to address the concerns raised by the DNI.”

Indeed, the SSCI report states full-time personnel in the IC increased by 20 percent after 9/11 because the Bush administration had not adequately funded that growth by allowing agencies to add personnel. Thus, agencies turned to contractors to avoid personnel caps.

In February 2005, the SSCI initiated an audit to examine the full scope of activities and resources necessary to support the administration's projections for IC personnel growth during fiscal years 2006-2011.

“As a result of this review and further study of the issue,” the SSCI concluded that “increasing personnel without a plan for enabling those personnel to work productively neither prevents intelligence failures nor guarantees enhanced performance.”

The SSCI also concluded that the White House has not adequately funded its personnel growth plan and that resources provided for personnel growth in some cases are done so at the expense of other programs.

The SSCI report “recommends that the DNI have greater flexibility in determining personnel levels for elements of the Intelligence Community in order to allow the DNI to better manage the balance of government and contractor employees.”

Still, the SSCI “continues to have concerns over the lack of hard data on the IC's personnel structure, size, and cost over the short, medium, and long terms. It is essential that the DNI be able to explain what criteria should be used to determine the proper mix of government and contractor employees within the Intelligence Community.”

Continuing, the SSCI report states that “the committee continues to emphasize that the best analysis and collection will not be attained by simply increasing the quantity of analysts and collectors but by also increasing the quality of analysts, collectors and their support networks. The DNI must also be able to explain the trade-offs that occur with hiring more people, as opposed to using the same appropriations to purchase other capabilities.

While IC end strength has grown by about 20 percent since 9/11, “unfortunately,” the SSCI reported, “significant shortages in training capacity and secure office space, along with inadequate planning for administrative, logistical, and technical support, have accompanied that growth.”

The SSCI has recommended that no future personnel growth take place until the challenges experienced in implementing the past growth have been addressed. The SSCI “continues to be concerned about the rate of growth in total personnel costs as a percentage of the overall intelligence budget and the lack of planning being done by the Executive branch to control that growth for the future.”

In January, the House passed a resolution to add a select intelligence oversight panel within the Appropriations Committee, but this congressional reform is far different from the proposal to enhance congressional oversight of intelligence that was proposed by the 9/11 Commission.

Rep. Obey, who sponsored the resolution, House Resolution 35, "A Resolution to Enhance Intelligence Oversighem” said “this is so the intelligence community knows that they are not just dealing with the individual members of the panel but the speaker of the House.”

A revamped, stringent curriculum of congressional oversight of the IC was one of the principal recommendations made by the 9/11 Commission in its final report, which concluded that “past oversight efforts in the intelligence area have been wholly inadequate.”

But despite President Bush’s endorsement of the commission’s call for reorganization of the congressional oversight structure - and Congress’ own investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office, having pointed out that “oversight will be key to success” - intelligence oversight was one of the few post-9/11 government reform recommendations lawmakers refused to implement.

Indeed, Congressional Research Service national defense specialist Richard Best Jr. noted that “the Intelligence Reform Act did not specify procedures for congressional oversight,” adding that questions have arisen “regarding the relative influence of Intelligence and Armed Services committees and [that] some members have suggested that certain intelligence matters should receive oversight from other committees.”

Ironically, Congress has an ally in DNI Mike McConnell. Prior to being nominated for the post, McConnell openly criticized Congress for not reforming its oversight of the IC per the 9/11 Commission’s recommendation, saying the Hill’s failure to reform its intelligence oversight in the face of repeated reports underscoring the necessity of such reform had just as much to do with Congress’ sudden discontent over its sorry dialogue with the IC as the IC had over Congress’ seeming lack of interest in intelligence at such a crucial period.

Nevertheless, in a floor speech to discuss HR 35, Obey assigned considerable more blame to the IC. “There have been two basic problems with the existing committee oversight arrangements. Number one, the Intelligence Community itself has had a great tendency to ignore the authorizing committee, the policy committee, if you please, because they don't provide the money. And, as you know, in this town, people like to follow the money,” he chastised.

“Secondly,” Obey continued, “we've been further handicapped because, on the Appropriations Committee, we have been blocked from doing the kind of investigations, the kind of oversight, that is necessary in order to provide proper checks and balances in a very delicate area.”

As an “example,” Obey said, “two years ago when [then Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld set up a separate intelligence operation outside of his own agency intelligence operation, we were blocked from doing a thorough review of that action and Congress was left flying blind.”

Despite Congress’ own long deteriorating disconnect with the IC oversight process, Obey did make salient points.

Indeed, following the disclosure of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) warrantless domestic electronic communications interception, the White House assured members of Congress that it would keep all members of the intelligence committees fully briefed. But as the story about the administration’s tracking of international money flows disclosed, that wasn’t the case. Indeed, Rep. Peter Hoekstra, then chairman of the House intelligence committee, indicated in a terse letter he wrote to President Bush that the administration is not sharing information on all of its intelligence operations under the oversight of Congress’ intelligence committees. Hoekstra complained of unidentified surveillance operations not publicly known at the time and perhaps still undisclosed.

“I have learned of some alleged intelligence community activities about which our committee has not been briefed,” Hoesktra wrote. “If these allegations are true, they may represent a breach of responsibility by the administration, a violation of the law and, just as importantly, a direct affront to me and the members of this committee who have so ardently supported efforts to collect information on our enemies. … The US Congress simply should not have to play Twenty Questions to get the information that it deserves under our Constitution.”

Hoekstra wasn’t alone. Rep. Heather Wilson was quoted as saying: “I think the executive branch has been insufficiently forthcoming on a number of important programs … there’s a presumption that if they don’t tell anybody, a problem may get better or it will solve itself.”

And Sen. Arlen Specter, at the time chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee and a very vocal conservative critic of administration secrecy and its failure to completely keep Congress informed, said, “the administration [has employed a] policy of not informing the Congress … in a way which enables the Congress and the Judiciary Committee to do our constitutional job on oversight.”

Congress, though, isn’t completely blameless, as the “Kimery Report ,”  As Hearings on Intel, HS Loom, Oversight Questions Emerge” and the August 2006, HSToday, feature," Getting Permission to Listen,” pointed out.

Both reports underscored the fact that IC oversight had steadily waned for many years and had been terribly neglected under the GOP’s control of Congress.

Barring another intelligence disaster or Democratic vilified covert activity like the CIA’s secret terrorist “rendition” program, it’s anyone’s guess whether the IC will be allowed to adequately repopulate and whether lawmakers reform and practice their oversight functioning.