Intelligent Management.

As the House and Senate continue to go back and forth on the issue of creating a national intelligence director, one gets a creeping feeling: from a management perspective, this is almost destined to end badly. We're now at the stage where a legitimate question--who should control the massive, widely dispersed intelligence budget--has become a political football. Both sides are floating cut-the-baby-in-half solutions: the House says the NID could "determine" the intelligence budget, while leaving the Pentagon in control of its day-to-day spy spending; the Senate wants the NID to have "exclusive control" over spending, but would limit transfers of funds or personnel to 10 percent of an individual agency's total in any single fiscal year. When and if they reach a compromise on these issues, the new NID will almost certainly enter office hamstrung by a Rube Goldberg spending machinery designed not to increase the efficiency of intelligence operations, but to satisfy various political interests.