A Drug War Boondoggle
The White House wants to kill it, but a little government agency may manage to live on
It merits only the briefest of mentions in the president's new budget, but those few lines of type could represent the final chapter in a long and twisted Washington saga. Stashed away on Page 1,181 is a paragraph that would effectively kill the little-known National Drug Intelligence Center, located in Johnstown, Pa., the site of the famous flood of 1889. Bush's budget proposes that the center's $40 million annual budget be slashed to $17 million--just enough to facilitate "the shutdown of the center and transfer of its responsibilities . . . to other Department of Justice elements."
If President Bush has his way, the center would be one of 154 programs eliminated or cut as part of his promise to curb federal spending. But as any veteran of Washington's budget wars will tell you, closing even a single federal program can be a herculean task. Perhaps no example is more illuminating than the NDIC, which, in its 12 years, has cost taxpayers at least $350 million. The facility has run through six directors, been rocked by scandal, and been subjected to persistent criticisms that it should have never been created at all.
Pork? In the beginning, the Johnstown center did have some friends in the White House. With the blessing of President George Herbert Walker Bush, then drug czar William Bennett proposed the creation of the NDIC in 1990. Its mission: to collect and coordinate intelligence from often-feuding law enforcement agencies in order to provide a strategic look at the war on drugs. But the Drug Enforcement Administration, worried that its pre-eminent role in the drug war was slipping away, openly fought the idea. So did many on Capitol Hill, arguing that the new center would duplicate the efforts of existing intelligence centers, notably the El Paso Intelligence Center, operated by the DEA. With little support in the law enforcement community, the NDIC looked all but dead. Enter Congressman John Murtha. The Pennsylvania Democrat, who chaired the House Appropriations Subcommittee for Defense, tucked the enabling legislation for the center into a Pentagon authorization bill, with the caveat that it would be placed in his district.
The center was troubled from the start. Murtha's new drug agency was funded by the Pentagon, but the Department of Justice was authorized to run it--an arrangement bound to cause problems. "All of us wanted the NDIC," says John Carnevale, a former official with the Office of National Drug Control Policy, as the drug czar's office is known. "But none of us wanted it in Johnstown. We viewed it as a jobs program that Mr. Murtha wanted [for his district]."
Murtha bristles at implications that the Johnstown center is a boondoggle. "They say anything we do is pork barrel," he fumes. The congressman argues that the federal government should spread its facilities around the country, citing the security risk of a centralized government and cheaper operating costs elsewhere. But "obviously," he says, "I wanted it in my district. I make no apologies for that."
Headquartered in a renovated department store downtown, the center has brought nearly 400 federal jobs to Johnstown, a struggling former steel-mill town. Law enforcement agencies, ordered to send employees to the new center, had trouble finding skilled analysts or executives who would agree to live in Johnstown. Even the bosses didn't want to go. The first director, former FBI official Doug Ball, traveled back and forth from his home near Washington. His deputy, former DEA agent Jim Milford, did the same and made no bones about it. "I've never come to terms," Milford says, "with the justification for the NDIC."
In 1993, when the NDIC officially opened, the congressional General Accounting Office issued a damning report citing duplication among 19 drug intelligence centers that already existed. And many involved in the process said the idea of gathering information from other law enforcement agencies for strategic assessments on drug trafficking just wasn't workable. In some cases, federal law prevented agencies from sharing sensitive intelligence; in others, rival agencies simply refused to give up proprietary information. "The bottom line," Milford said, "was that we had to actually search for a mission."
Stonewalled, the NDIC began operating, effectively, as an extended staff for other drug agencies, working on projects too cumbersome, peripheral, or time-consuming for their own teams of intelligence analysts. The center was costing about $30 million a year, but, as a former official of the drug czar's office put it bluntly, "we saw nothing" from it.
Former DEA official Dick Canas, who took over the NDIC in 1996--one of the few bosses who actually moved to Johnstown--was determined to elevate the facility's status. He began collating and analyzing "open-source information" --intelligence already available to the public--and pulling it all together in one place. The plan was "nonthreatening" to other agencies, Canas argued, and would at least provide policymakers with a general overview of the war on drugs. That project morphed into an annual report called the National Drug Threat Assessment, which officials say is of some real value.
The Johnstown center racked up one other success. Its "document exploitation" program regularly dispatched analysts into the field to process files seized by other law-enforcement agencies using software it developed called RAID (real-time analytical intelligence database). Johnstown analysts used the software to organize data and help law enforcement agencies develop investigative leads.
Cronyism? In 2000, the Clinton administration tried to define the center's role more sharply by releasing the General Counterdrug Intelligence Plan, which restricted the reach of the Johnstown center to domestic intelligence only. Canas, gone by 1999, was replaced by another DEA executive, Mike Horn, who was the fifth interim or permanent director in six years; Horn kept an apartment in Johnstown but traveled back to a home in the Washington area on weekends.
Horn's tenure made everything that came before it seem placid. Despite the NDIC's domestic mandate, Horn and his assistant, Mary Lou Rodgers, made frequent trips abroad to promote a new version of the RAID software in places like Hong Kong, London, and Vienna, racking up nearly $164,000 in travel expenses in less than four years. A Justice Department investigation in 2003 admonished Horn for "unprofessional conduct in . . . dealings with Ms. Rodgers," but that wasn't the end of it. A letter-writing campaign by NDIC employees accused Horn of continued travel abuse and cronyism, prompting another review by Justice lawyers last year. It was also discovered that the new version of the RAID software promoted by Horn had yet to be developed. Many NDIC insiders say morale was poor.
In March 2004, Associate Deputy Attorney General David Margolis suspended Horn's power to authorize travel for Rodgers. In June 2004, Margolis fired Horn. The Justice Department won't comment on the matter. Horn claims all travel was approved and says he has not been made to pay restitution. Horn blames the low morale on malcontents who resented the quality of work he demanded. "I recognized that a lot of reports were God-awful, poorly written, poorly researched, and, in some cases, wrong," he says. Some insiders say that under Horn, the center got as close as it ever would to producing some truly strategic intelligence reports. Not surprisingly, in light of the morale and other problems, others disagree.
Either way, the White House appears to have had it with the NDIC. In its budget report, the Office of Management and Budget says "the proliferation of intelligence centers across the government has not necessarily led to more or better intelligence, but rather more complications in the management of information." For the Johnstown center, it's an ironic coda, then, that the White House is simultaneously supporting a new program--the multiagency Drug Intelligence Fusion Center. Blessed by the DEA, the fusion center will be located in the Washington area. It has already received $25 million from Congress in start-up costs and is slated to open its doors later this year. The idea that a different agency can do the job the NDIC failed to do has left some shaking their heads. "You have to ask, 'What is the master plan?'" said a former official in the office of the drug czar. "The answer is there is no master plan." Proponents say the new agency will succeed because its location makes sense.
That doesn't mean the NDIC is finished. It has supporters in state and local law enforcement, and even some federal officials have come to respect its document exploitation division. The NDIC's biggest supporter, though, is Murtha. "I can assure employees that the NDIC won't be closed," he said in a public statement after Bush's budget was released. While Murtha is no longer chair of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, he remains the ranking Democrat and a backroom dealer with few equals. In the Senate, Pennsylvania Republican Arlen Specter will fight to keep the center open from his seat on the Appropriations Committee. The showdown could come as soon as next month, when appropriations subcommittees begin tackling the budget.
To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of Johnstown center's death may be premature. "Barring another flood," says a former law-enforcement official, "I doubt you'll see it go anywhere."
This story appears in the May 9, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.