‘Top Secret America’ lifts the curtain on intelligence community ‘Office Space’

The Washington Post’s Dana Priest and William Arkin went live early this morning with ‘Top Secret America’, a series on duplication of effort, government waste, and lax government oversight that prevents our intelligence community from doing all it can to protect us from terrorists and other threats. Some of the stats they came up with are just great – there are more than 850,000 Americans with top secret government clearance. If they all lived in their own city, it would go between Detroit and San Francisco in terms of population and be twelfth in the nation.

If you want to get a sense of how bad the problem they identify really is, this paragraph from the first entry in the series boils it down really well:

Another senior intelligence official with wide access to many programs said that secrecy is sometimes used to protect ineffective projects. “I think the secretary of defense ought to direct a look at every single thing to see if it still has value,” he said. “The DNI ought to do something similar.”

Got that? There is too much duplication of effort and wasting of taxpayer money in the intelligence community, so how does a senior intelligence official say we should fix it? He says that two different top government stakeholders should order up two different reviews that will come up with two different conclusions about fixing all of the problems in the intelligence community. It’s a great example of being so far down in the sewer that you can’t tell that you’re swimming in poop anymore.

Reading Priest and Arkin’s opus reminded me of this much-loved scene in Mike Judge’s infamous film ‘Office Space’:

The difference in this case, as WaPo reveals, is that the intelligence community is full of Bill Lumberghs, but there are no ‘Bobs’ because they don’t have the top secret clearance necessary to review all the mismanagement and waste. But if you don’t fund every stupid program the military and intelligence communities, you must be an enemy of freedom.

The mundane character of the problem also makes this story a tough one to tell. As great story-tellers as Priest and Arkin really are, part one in the series comes off like a slightly more accessible Government Accountability Office report. It’s laudable of the Washington Post to continue to sponsor hard-hitting journalism like what we see in ‘Top Secret America’. The problem is that however hard-hitting it is, incompetence is not always villainy, and villainy is what makes for a really memorable story where government mismanagement is concerned. It’ll be interesting to see if their subsequent reports which will cover the contractors getting fat off the many teats of the post-9/11 intelligence explosion, will give this story the bad guys it needs to put it on a level with Priest’s highly-memorable earlier tales of secret CIA prisons and the mismanagement of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Which is to say that I praise the effort, but see sticking this one in the public consciousness to be an uphill climb for the good people at the Washington Post.