This made the CIA an important change among many important changes, not the full focus of the Act. It also gave a Congressional stamp of approval to the creation of a Black Budget through new appropriations provisions and sweeping reporting exemptions see Pub. It was also empowered to reimburse other government agencies for personnel assigned to the CIA which those agencies could assign without regard to any law to the contrary , rent and repair premises, and fix age limits to CIA positions without regard to any law to the contrary see id.
This is mostly in line with the previous National Security Act reprogramming provisions, but it gave the CIA a few new toys: more flexibility for interagency reprogramming, and the ability to rent and purchase property with less reporting and oversight see id. However, chief among the changes was a doozy you probably spotted—complete freedom from any provisions or laws outside the CIA Act which would otherwise limit shifting funds to programs or agencies not originally anticipated by a Congressional appropriation pursuant to the Appropriations Clause of the Constitution see id.
To take the normal dangers of reprogramming even further, the CIA Act also authorized the CIA to spend notwithstanding other laws, and with minimal oversight, stating:.
However, the bulk of the CIA Act limited reporting requirements for the intelligence community substantially. However, these exemptions are so broad as to create the Black Budget issues we see today. The Act also added some clarification to the reporting requirements for non-financial activity.
Classified semi-annual reports summarizing activities are required to be given to the DCI, and then given to the intelligence committees. However, overall the CIA Act served to dramatically reduce restrictions on reporting and reprogramming for the intelligence community and, eventually, for the Black Budget. The intelligence community also uses private contractors, and to some degree the Black Budget reporting protections are extended to them as well. In particular, and in addition to any protections of classified information, private contractors can be exempted from SEC reporting requirements by the Director of National Intelligence through a series of executive actions by Presidents Reagan and G.
They each used executive actions to change how private contractors were used by Black Budget agencies, allowing greater secrecy and creating larger holes in the reporting requirements of the intelligence community. President Reagan used an executive order, and President G.
Bush used a presidential memo. Executive orders have a few legal requirements in order to be used, while Presidential memos have none. Executive orders must be able to cite the legal authority the president has to make the order, report the estimated fiscal costs of the order, and be published to the Federal Register. A memo, on the other hand, may do any of those things, but none of that is required. Instead, it simply directs an agency to act in a certain manner see Quester, Rachel, Executive or Memorandum?
President Reagan used Executive Order in , in order to allow the outsourcing of classified projects to private contractors. The order states:. Contracts or arrangements with academic institutions may be undertaken only with the consent of appropriate officials of the institution.
In a later memorandum, President G. Bush waived the SEC reporting requirements for contractors. The SEC Act itself grants the authority to any president to exempt contractors from reporting via 15 U. Each directive issued under this paragraph shall set forth the specific facts and circumstances with respect to which the provisions of this paragraph are to be invoked.
Each such directive shall, unless renewed in writing, expire one year after the date of issuance. In performing such function, you should consult the heads of departments and agencies, as appropriate. This creates an issue similar to and intertwined with the governmental reporting requirements discussed previously, but now drastically compounded in that it extends all those issues to private entities as well—allowing for much greater loss of transparency.
The sheer lack of transparency is magnified when government spending is further obscured through private companies with no reporting requirements and the public and much of Congress is left with no knowledge of the specifics—what is purchased, the prices, the intellectual property details of the private agreements, and more are all left behind a wall inaccessible to all but a very few in Congress if at all.
There has been some effort on this front even before the troubling revelations of whistleblowers such as William Binney and Edward Snowden as to the sheer extent of some domestic surveillance projects funded by the Black Budget.
For instance, the Hughes-Ryan Amendment was one such attempt to bring greater government oversight to the Black Budget. The Amendment stated:. In , the Hughes-Ryan Amendment was supplemented by a statutory requirement directing intelligence reporting to two intelligence committees Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year , Public L. This obviously has some fairly substantial leeway to circumvent reporting.
However, it was still a substantial step forward at the time. In , Congress took further steps to increase accountability on the intelligence community.
The finding must specify each federal agency funding or participating in the action, and whether any third parties will fund or participate in the action id. However, the Act also has a pair of clauses ensuring a certain degree of non-interference.
In other words, the intelligence committees are entitled to know pretty much everything the intelligence community is doing, but likewise cannot interfere in operations aside from, ostensibly, cutting funding. A few years later, in the Intelligence Authorization Act for fiscal year , Congress added a requirement for an unclassified annual report on the activities of the intelligence community Public L.
This once again leaves quite a bit of wiggle room. However, versions of the annual and now semi-annual reports can be received via a FOIA request 7 or occasionally found online. Even still, this has led to some further reporting from the intelligence community—albeit generally on very surface level matters—which can once again be received via a FOIA request 9 or occasionally found online. Over the years, Congress has instituted a variety of reporting requirements, with mixed success. Each new controversy arising out of the intelligence community usually prompts some manner of new reporting requirement, but the information to the public is often sorely lacking nonetheless.
The reports that do exist publicly are often high level overviews lacking any detail or specificity, or redacted to uselessness.
The unfortunate answer to this question is an almost certain yes. The very idea of the Black Budget certainly does not seem in line with the Constitutional goal of a public holding its government—and especially the Executive branch—accountable through the power of the purse.
So, is the Black Budget constitutional? Richardson , U. Richardson was one of the first cases to really challenge the Appropriations Clause constitutionality of Black Budget practices and specifically the CIA Act appropriations provisions. The first failed to go anywhere but the second, arguing that the CIA Act violated the Appropriations Clause of the Constitution, made it all the way to the Supreme Court.
The highest Court in the land shut down the claims against the CIA Act, and very nearly any other future similar claim, completely.
This is a fairly common approach to taxpayer standing, or lack thereof, under the law. In order to have standing to sue, it is generally required that you have suffered more than a generalized grievance—an injury specific to you that is not suffered by the public at large.
The Chief Justice at the time, Warren Burger, said in the case:. As our society has become more complex, our numbers more vast, our lives more varied, and our resources more strained, citizens increasingly request the intervention of the courts on a greater variety of issues than at any period of our national development.
Richardson , supra, U. The Supreme Court was not unanimous in its ruling on the issue; the case came out as a split. The dissent suggested that standing should not be denied when an injury is widespread but truly exists as it denies redress on the grounds that too many people are injured.
The argument of the dissent went along the lines that as long as the plaintiff can establish an injury to their personal rights as opposed to a more general right of the public, they should be granted standing. However, this is an argument that has never been adopted in any actual Supreme Court ruling on standing.
This means that, after Richardson, the door was shut on any would-be lawsuit unless a particularized injury could be established—an incredibly difficult task when it comes to financial reporting and appropriations provisions if what is discussed above is taken off the table. It also falls in line with, as mentioned, the usual approach to standing in the courts. This means that, if the situation is to be changed, it will be on Congress and the people and state and local governments who put pressure on their representatives or take matters into their own hands to take action.
Michele Ferri and Jonathan Lurie are both practicing attorneys out of California. The Law Offices of Lurie and Ferri focus on working with start-up businesses as well as on intellectual property and business law issues. The Act defines covert action as an activity or activities of the United States Government to influence political, economic, or military conditions abroad, where it is intended that the role of the United States Government will not be apparent or acknowledged publicly, but does not include: 1 activities the primary purpose of which is to acquire intelligence, traditional counterintelligence activities, traditional activities to improve or maintain the operational security of United States Government programs, or administrative activities; 2 traditional diplomatic or military activities or routine support to such activities; 3 traditional law enforcement activities conducted by United States Government law enforcement agencies or routine support to such activities; or 4 activities to provide routine support to the overt activities other than activities described in paragraph 1 , 2 , or 3 of other United States Government agencies abroad.
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On April 13, , the US National Archives of Administration provided nearly , pages of documents during the Reagan administration, including its Personal Journal.
In this, on 11 June , the president wrote:. This is curious because Space Shuttle has a maximum of 8 people and only 5 for space flight. Even fully loaded it would be impossible to place and maintain astronauts in orbit. Reagan has revealed the existence of a highly classified space program that could host hundreds of astronauts in orbit? Join our mailing list to receive the latest news and updates from our team.
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