Intelligence is the bookend to President-elect Obama's nominating process that began with his naming people to key economic positions in November. Last week, PEBO named Leon Panetta as Director of CIA, Dennis Blair as Director of National Intelligence, and John Brennan as both Homeland Security Advisor and Deputy National Security Advisor for Counterterrorism.
While the CIA and National Intelligence are independent federal agencies, Brennan's outfit is part of the Executive Office of the President run by the Chief of Staff. Tracking down who reports to whom is its own intelligence operation so we think we've got this right when we submit that Brennan probably will report to Jim Jones, who, as National Security Advisor, is slated to run the National Security Council.
(FYI, all this national security apparatus is the result of the National Security Act of 1947. Perhaps it's time for an update as, shall we say, things have changed a bit in the subsequent years.)
Although these are by no means all of them, the DNI coordinates 16 intelligence-related agencies scattered throughout the US government, ranging from CIA to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to the US Coast Guard. On the US Gov map, we represent these agencies as having dotted-line/matrix reports to the DNI, relationships that show up as cross-links running from the cluster that we label "FEDERAL AGENCIES" (you can find it at about 2 o'clock when you lick on the map) to other parts of the government. While the position was touted as an "intelligence czar" when it was created, the relationship that the DNI has to its members is, as we understand it, more likely coordination than control.
Launched in 2005, the DNI is a recent and very unusual structure in the formal org chart of the federal government, born as part of the post-9/11 overhaul in the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004. The DNI's position is a dramatic example of the "virtual reorganization" of government, in this case a formal coordinating network set up by legislation and layered on the physical hierarchy-bureaucracy infrastructure.
In the next few days, we'll release "Virtual Reorganization" the third in our series of NetAge Reports, which focuses on the power of reorganization without moving the bureaucratic boxes around.
