Latest in congressional oversight
Congress tries to reform itself and streamline oversight of the Department of Homeland Security. Maybe this time is the charm.
The Senate has voted down a joint resolution that sought to end U.S. support for the Saudi-led campaign in Yemen. But that doesn’t mean that the joint resolution didn’t serve its intended purpose.
A bipartisan group of senators has introduced a joint resolution to compel the Trump administration to end U.S. support for the Saudi-led campaign in Yemen. This deep dive explains how the resolution's procedural context within Congress should shape understanding of the proposal.
Don't shut down the Congressional investigations. They are more important that the Special Counsel inquiry ....
Recent reporting in the Wall Street Journal that President Trump “has given the Central Intelligence Agency secret new authority to conduct drone strikes against suspected terrorists" is causing a lot of hand-wringing. Should it?
On November 30th, the House passed H.R. 6393, the Intelligence Authorization Act for FY'17. While it remains to be seen what if anything ultimately emerges at the end of the process, I'd like to highlight some items in the current bill that I found particularly interesting:
- two involve attempts to give SSCI and HPSCI greater awareness of presidential policy directives and MOUs involving the IC;
Congress has been derilict for 13 years. The time to fix the jurisdictional muddle that is "control" over DHS is now. Not in two years, not in four .. but now.
A brief review of Linda L. Fowler, Watchdogs on the Hill: The Decline of Congressional Oversight of U.S. Foreign Relations (Princeton UP 2015).
Despite the substantial overlap between counterterrorism activities undertaken by the CIA and JSOC, we tend to pay a lot more attention to the details of the congressional oversight framework for the former as compared to the latter. The NDAA often addresses CT oversight relating to DOD activities, however, and this year is no exception. What follows below is an attempt to provide a user-friendly guide to the proposals on the table.
I. Increasing the pace of quarterly operational briefings regarding CT:
Linda L. Fowler's recent book, Watchdogs on the Hill, says that Congressional oversight of foreign relations and national security has been in serious decline