Congress Adjusts
Congress as a whole, like the executive branch, adjusted slowly to the rise of
transnational terrorism as a threat to national security. In particular, the
growing threat and capabilities of Bin Ladin were not understood in Congress. As
the most representative branch of the federal government, Congress closely
tracks trends in what public opinion and the electorate identify as key issues.
In the years before September 11, terrorism seldom registered as important. To
the extent that terrorism did break through and engage the attention of the
Congress as a whole, it would briefly command attention after a specific
incident, and then return to a lower rung on the public policy agenda.
Several points about Congress are worth noting. First, Congress always has a
strong orientation toward domestic affairs. It usually takes on foreign policy
and national security issues after threats are identified and articulated by the
administration. In the absence of such a detailed-and repeated-articulation,
national security tends not to rise very high on the list of congressional
priorities. Presidents are selective in their use of political capital for
international issues.
In the decade before 9/11, presidential discussion of and congressional and
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 context was often
terrorists' tactics-a chemical, biological, nuclear, or computer threat-not
terrorist organizations.107
Second, Congress tends to follow the overall lead of the president on budget
issues with respect to national security matters. There are often sharp
arguments 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 programs in fiscal year 1999, the key decisions on overall
allocation of resources for national security issues in the decade before
9/11-including counterterrorism funding-were made in the president's Office of
Management and Bud-get.108
Third, Congress did not reorganize itself after the end of the Cold War to
address new threats. Recommendations by the Joint Committee on the Organization
of Congress were implemented, in part, in the House of Representatives 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 jurisdiction 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 integrated 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.109
Fourth, the oversight function of Congress has diminished over time. In
recent years, traditional review of the administration of programs and the
implementation of laws has been replaced by "a focus on personal
investigations, possible scandals, and issues designed to generate media
attention." The unglamorous but essential work of oversight has been
neglected, and few members past or present believe it is performed well. DCI
Tenet told us: "We ran from threat to threat to threat.. . . [T]here was
not a system in place to say, 'You got to go back and do this and this and
this.'" Not just the DCI but the entire executive branch needed help from
Congress in addressing the questions of counterterrorism strategy and policy,
looking past day-to-day concerns. Members of Congress, however, also found their
time spent on such everyday matters, or in looking back to investigate mistakes,
and often missed the big questions-as did the executive branch. Staff tended as
well to focus on parochial considerations, seeking to add or cut funding for
individual (often small) programs, instead of emphasizing comprehensive
oversight projects.110
Fifth, on certain issues, other priorities pointed Congress in a direction
that was unhelpful in meeting the threats that were emerging in the months
leading up to 9/11. Committees with oversight responsibility for aviation
focused overwhelmingly on airport congestion and the economic health of the
airlines, not aviation security. Committees with responsibility for the INS
focused on the Southwest border, not on terrorists. Justice Department officials
told us that committees with responsibility for the FBI tightly restricted
appropriations for improvements in information technology, in part because of
concerns about the FBI's ability to manage such projects. Committees responsible
for South Asia spent the decade of the 1990s imposing sanctions on Pakistan,
leaving presidents with little leverage to alter Pakistan's policies before
9/11. Committees with responsibility for the Defense Department paid little heed
to developing military responses to terrorism and stymied intelligence reform.
All committees found themselves swamped in the minutiae of the budget process,
with little time for consideration of longer-term questions, or what many
members past and present told us was the proper conduct of oversight.111
Each of these trends contributed to what can only be described as Congress's
slowness and inadequacy in treating the issue of terrorism in the years before
9/11.The legislative branch adjusted little and did not restructure itself to
address changing threats.112 Its attention to terrorism was episodic
and splintered across several committees. Congress gave little guidance to
executive branch agencies, did not reform them in any significant way, and did
not systematically perform oversight to identify, address, and attempt to
resolve the many problems in national security and domestic agencies that became
apparent in the aftermath of 9/11.
Although individual representatives and senators took significant steps, the
overall level of attention in the Congress to the terrorist threat was low. We
examined the number of hearings on terrorism from January 1998 to September
2001.The Senate Armed Services Committee held nine-four related to the attack on
the USS Cole. The House Armed Services Committee also held nine, six of
them by a special oversight panel on terrorism. The Senate Foreign Relations
Committee and its House counterpart both held four. The Senate Select Committee
on Intelligence, in addition to its annual worldwide threat hearing, held eight;
its House counterpart held perhaps two exclusively devoted to counterterrorism,
plus the briefings by its terrorist working group. The Senate and House
intelligence panels did not raise public and congressional attention on Bin
Ladin and al Qaeda prior to the joint inquiry into the attacks of September 11,
perhaps in part because of the classified nature of their work. Yet in the
context of committees that each hold scores of hearings every year on issues in
their jurisdiction, this list is not impressive. Terrorism was a second- or
third-order priority within the committees of Congress responsible for national
security.113
In fact, Congress had a distinct tendency to push questions of emerging
national security threats off its own plate, leaving them for others to
consider. Congress asked outside commissions to do the work that arguably was at
the heart of its own oversight responsibilities.114 Beginning in
1999, the reports of these commissions made scores of recommendations to address
terrorism and homeland security but drew little attention from Congress. Most of
their impact came after 9/11.
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