Congress: A Pre-9/11 State of Mind

Ten years after 9/11, the least reformed part of America’s intelligence system is not the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), but the United States Congress. The September 11th terrorist attacks sparked major efforts to transform executive branch intelligence agencies. These include the creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the most sweeping intelligence restructuring since the establishment of the CIA in 1947; the formation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which combined twenty-two agencies and two-hundred thousand employees to provide "one face at the border;" dramatic initiatives to transform the FBI from a law enforcement to domestic intelligence agency; and the proliferation of more than seventy regional, state, and local terrorist fusion centers to integrate terrorist threat reporting across the country.

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