How Breaking News Should Affect Priorities

Marc Ambinder, on a roll, reports that Congress, through the classified budgeting process, planned to slash at least $25 million in funding from the National Counterterrorism Center, the agency responsible for, among other things, maintaining a critical core database of terrorism suspects, including attempted bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. I do find it really problematic when single incidents cause abrupt shifts in policy, or in treating certain issues as priorities, but this seems like a case where that budget might need to be revisited.

Marc points out that intelligence community leaders were pushing back against the funding cuts long before the attempted bombing. And Spencer Ackerman describes how "eight or nine" analysts in the center were being charged with sorting through, integrating, and drawing conclusions from millions of data points from the Middle East, which sounds like a misappropriation to resources to this non-intel expert. As policy decisions are made, it's important to determine whether Abdulmutallab was an exception or a symptom. In aviation security, he may have been an anomaly, but in intelligence-gathering, he may have been a symptom of an over-taxed system. Answering those questions will be key to determining the policy choices that result from his attempt at a terrorist attack.