R.J. Hillhouse, who publishes an excellent blog on intelligence outsourcing, has parsed the DNI Powerpoint slides I obtained last week and come up with some surprising conclusions. “By reverse engineering the numbers in an underlying data element embedded in the presentation, it seems that the total budget of the 16 US intelligence agencies in fiscal year 2005 was $60 billion, almost 25% higher than previously believed.” That would account for some of the higher numbers I found in the documents and reported on in my recent article for Salon, which was the first to report that 70 percent of the US intelligence budget is spent on contracts. To read Hillhouse’s article in full, click here
Update: The Defense Intelligence Agency has taken the DNI Powerpoint presentation quantifying intelligence contracts down from its website, apparently in response to my piece in Salon and Hillhouse’s posting on her blog. Steven Aftergood, who edits Secrecy News for the Federation of American Scientists, has posted the DNI slides on the FAS website, here. Hillhouse continues the discussion here and Aftergood picks it up here.
