DOE MAINTAINS INCREASED INTELLIGENCE BUDGET SECRECY
The 9-11 Commission concluded last year that the best way to begin to
combat the excessive secrecy that has undermined the performance of
U.S. intelligence agencies would be to disclose the annual
intelligence budgets of those agencies, as well as their aggregate
total (9-11 Commission Final Report, p. 416).
But the Department of Energy, which always used to disclose the
budget of its small Office of Intelligence, has chosen to move in
the opposite direction.
For the second year in a row, DOE has classified its formerly
unclassified budget request for intelligence in budget documents
released today.
The last unclassified appropriation for DOE intelligence was in
Fiscal Year 2004, when the budget was $39,823,000, a minuscule
amount by U.S. intelligence standards.
Incredibly, although this FY 2004 figure can still be found on the
DOE budget web site (included in House Report 108-357), DOE now
claims that it too is classified information. The Department has
gone so far as to withhold the published figure from disclosure
under the Freedom of Information Act.
Previously, for more than a decade, the size of the DOE intelligence
budget was unclassified public information. Along with the State
Department's Intelligence and Research Bureau, DOE intelligence was
one of the few intelligence community components to have an
unclassified budget.
"The DOE intelligence budget does not disclose any classified
information," advised John G. Keliher, then-Director of the DOE
Office of Nonproliferation and National Security, in a June 24, 1994
letter he wrote on the subject.
"National security is neither threatened nor damaged as a result of
the unclassified [DOE] intelligence budget released to the public,"
he wrote.
But that was then. According to one DOE official, the Central
Intelligence Agency directed the Department to cease publishing its
intelligence budget total. That assertion, not for attribution,
could not be independently confirmed.
Several annual DOE intelligence budget requests dating from before
the big chill set in may be found here:
http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/doe/budget.html"The [DOE] intelligence program provides information and technical
analyses on international arms proliferation, foreign nuclear
programs, and other energy related matters to policy makers in the
Department and other U.S. government agencies," according to last
year's DOE appropriations bill.