Timothy Roemer: “I rise in strong support and bipartisan support of this bill overall. I do, however, bring up one consideration as…”

“I rise in strong support and bipartisan support of this bill overall. I do, however, bring up one consideration as amendment on this bill, and that is we do not want to reveal agency operations, we do not want to reveal any individual agency budgets, and we do not want to reveal spending on any kind of specific programs. Given those parameters, what this amendment argues is for one ray of sunshine, one simple disclosure of the aggregate funding of all intelligence activities for fiscal year 1999. Not this year's request, not this year's budget, but 1999's budget. We do that in light of the fact, and I stress to my colleagues, that the intelligence community has voluntarily disclosed the 1998 and the 1997 budgets, so we are simply saying that this one ray of sunlight comes down for the taxpayer to have some kind of sense of what the overall budget is for our intelligence community.”