Congress' 'Black' Budgets Scrutinized

Cunningham Case Reveals Abuses Hidden Inside Intelligence Bills

(AP) 
Hoekstra said he still has questions about how much Cunningham relied on legislation and how much he bullied people at the Pentagon to direct money to certain contractors. "We clearly see that he tried to use the committee to do bad things," Hoekstra said in an interview.

He and Harman are putting additional protections into the process of drafting legislation, although Hoekstra described Cunningham as a special case. "This guy bastardized the process the whole way through," Hoekstra said.

"But even if you put in additional safeguards, it doesn't necessarily mean that someone who wants to enrich themselves is not going to be able to," he added.

Efforts to direct money to specific projects or interests, called earmarking, are common. But more than a dozen government officials and other experts interviewed by The Associated Press agreed that the process is vulnerable to abuse because of its classified nature.

Secret legislation long has been a tool for pet projects.

In the early 1990s, Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., used classified legislation to try to move one-third of the CIA from Washington's Virginia suburbs to his home state.

In one episode stretching from 1999 until at least 2001, tensions between the then-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., and the Defense Intelligence Agency peaked when Shelby used his panel's legislation to direct significant chunks of the agency's budget to projects in a science-intensive spying discipline called Measurement and Signatures Intelligence. The projects he pressed for benefited aerospace-focused Huntsville, Ala.

At the time, the DIA wanted to spend that money on traditional human spying. Because the money was in the classified portion of the intelligence bill, the public never knew of the debate.

Shelby's office did not respond to requests for comment.

A former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, now-retired Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., said he does not like earmarking. "Essentially it takes what should be a rational process of allocating public dollars and makes it into politics based, not merit based," he said.

Jim Currie, a Democratic aide on the Senate committee from 1985 to 1991, said classified bills are the perfect place to slip in provisions not scrutinized. Rarely do members of Congress examine the legislation, which is stored in safes in each committee's windowless, vault-like offices.

Congressional aides play an important role in reviewing the bills for items that are suspicious. But Stern, the auditor for the House Intelligence Committee, found that Cunningham harassed staff members to get his way, undermining that oversight. Once, when an aide found out that a Cunningham spending priority had been changed, he wrote in an e-mail: "I am under my desk, ducking and covering."

One committee member, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., said Cunningham also had an exaggerated personality. "If he were talking about a tuna fish sandwich, it could drive him to anger or tears," Issa said. "Some of his actions were discounted as, 'It's just Duke."'

Issa said the best safeguard for secret legislation is awareness on the part of the committee. "The support of the staff pushing back and making more public individual requests for conversations is helping," he said.

Several committee Democrats expressed pessimism that Congress will do its job, however.

"Our committee — our 20-odd people and a comparable number of staff — cannot offer sufficient oversight over many billions of dollars of activity," said Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J.

"We don't try," he said.