public attention to foreign affairs and national security were dominated by
other issues--among them, Haiti, Bosnia, Russia, China, Somalia, Kosovo,
NATO enlargement, the Middle East peace process, missile defense, and glob-
alization.Terrorism infrequently took center stage; and when it did, the con-
text was often terrorists' tactics--a chemical, biological, nuclear, or computer
threat--not terrorist organizations.
about individual programs and internal priorities, but by and large the overall
funding authorized and appropriated by the Congress comes out close to the
president's request. This tendency was certainly illustrated by the downward
trends in spending on defense, intelligence, and foreign affairs in the first part
of the 1990s. The White House, to be sure, read the political signals coming
from Capitol Hill, but the Congress largely acceded to the executive branch's
funding requests. In the second half of the decade, Congress appropriated some
98 percent of what the administration requested for intelligence programs.Apart
from the Gingrich supplemental of $1.5 billion for overall intelligence pro-
grams in fiscal year 1999, the key decisions on overall allocation of resources
for national security issues in the decade before 9/11--including counterter-
rorism funding--were made in the president's Office of Management and Bud-
get.
nization of Congress were implemented, in part, in the House of Representa-
tives after the 1994 elections, but there was no reorganization of national
security functions.The Senate undertook no appreciable changes.Traditional
issues--foreign policy, defense, intelligence--continued to be handled by
committees whose structure remained largely unaltered, while issues such as
transnational terrorism fell between the cracks.Terrorism came under the juris-
diction of at least 14 different committees in the House alone, and budget and
oversight functions in the House and Senate concerning terrorism were also
splintered badly among committees. Little effort was made to consider an inte-
grated policy toward terrorism, which might range from identifying the threat
to addressing vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure; and the piecemeal
approach in the Congress contributed to the problems of the executive branch
in formulating such a policy.
implementation of laws has been replaced by "a focus on personal investiga-
tions, possible scandals, and issues designed to generate media attention."The
unglamorous but essential work of oversight has been neglected, and few mem-
bers past or present believe it is performed well. DCI Tenet told us: "We ran