CAMPUS NOTEBOOK

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By Elizabeth Brotherton and Emily Yehle, ROLL CALL STAFF


Intelligent Suicide. The Government Accountability Office may be the government's main watchdog agency, but it rarely investigates a key sector: the intelligence community.

It's not that the agency doesn't want to; rather, it gave up trying long ago because it was too difficult to get any information out of secretive agencies like the CIA.

On Friday, Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii) held a hearing on whether Congress should explicitly assign the GAO the task of overseeing the management and structure of the national intelligence community. He hopes to get the word out about a bill he recently introduced that would give GAO more power to investigate those agencies.

"They are part of our government," Akaka said. "To have federal agencies not cooperate is unheard of."

As it stands now, most of the oversight is done by the Senate and House Intelligence committees. The GAO rarely intervenes, only taking up an audit or investigation if Congress explicitly asks. Otherwise, the agency is wasting resources on agencies that won't cooperate and won't follow any recommendations, Comptroller General David Walker said.

But Walker and intelligence experts also said Friday that the Intelligence committees do not have the resources to handle all the oversight duties of a highly complex system. The GAO has experts who can help the intelligence community assess how best to manage its work and work force, they argued.

Denying the GAO information only is detrimental to the agencies themselves, Walker said.

"They're shooting themselves in the foot," he said after the hearing. "We could help them."