Norman D. Dicks: “As she knows, when we buy a weapons system at the Pentagon, sometimes there are billions of dollars of unobligated funds…”

“As she knows, when we buy a weapons system at the Pentagon, sometimes there are billions of dollars of unobligated funds that are spend over a period of time. In the intelligence area, we incrementally fund. It was the opinion of George Mahon and some of the senior members of the Committee on Appropriations many years ago that we could not risk a situation where Congress has not passed its budget by the start of the fiscal year. They believed it was necessary to have a certain amount of flexibility in carryforward funds to keep these programs going, if the Congress did not get the Defense budget passed. There was a kind of agreement among the players to do this. What I object to, and I know the gentlewoman from Colorado objects to, is that this account, and each one of these were for different national technical means, different satellite programs, is that these accounts grew too large in the aggregate. None of the money was misspent. I think the fault was that Congress was not kept appropriately advised about the magnitude. I can tell the Members, I am very pleased that it was the staff of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and particularly the minority staff, that went to the NRO, found this out, made it known to the other key committees in the Congress, and last year we dramatically reduced the amount of money in those accounts.”