Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2011
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. CONAWAY. I thank the gentleman for yielding, I appreciate the chairman's words, and I hope those aren't mutually exclusive, being distinguished and being from Texas.
I rise in strong, strong support of this year's Intelligence authorization bill and encourage my colleagues, all of them, to support this. But with that strong support comes a modest amount of disappointment in that, through no fault of anyone in particular, we had to make a tough decision to strike section 412 from the bill, which would have allowed certain elements within the intel community to set up their own direct accounts with Treasury. It's a bit of an arcane statement, but it allows greater steps toward achieving auditability across the intelligence community. This provision was intended to promote this goal of better financial accountability and insight into our classified spending.
The intelligence community, Mr. Chairman, must meet the same financial accounting standards as the rest of the government. Those accounting standards will help uncover savings in current programs that can be reinvested into vital intelligence priorities or returned to the taxpayers.
While I am disappointed that the provision was not in the 2011 bill, I have already had good conversations with the chairman in reference to the 2012 bill, which will be in committee in the next couple of weeks, so that we can continue to move the intelligence community, their various slots, toward accountability, which is important for the taxpayer, and it helps give management a reliable tool. If they've got those systems, got the internal controls in place, it will give them tools in order to manage the money, the precious resources that we take from the taxpayers and entrust to the intelligence community to do the great work that they have done over these past years.
There is no greater example of that, of course, than the find-and-fix portion of the bin Laden experience that we saw play out on May 1 and 2, a terrific achievement by folks whose faces will never be seen, whose names will never be known except to them and their colleagues. They'll know who they are. They'll have that great pride of knowing they've done great work for this country using the tools that we provide them.
I urge my colleagues to support the reauthorization bill.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source