Intelligence Reform: GAO Can Assist the Congress and the Intelligence Community on Management Reform Initiatives

For decades, GAO has assisted Congress in its oversight role and helped federal departments and agencies with disparate missions to improve the economy, efficiency, and effectiveness of their operations. GAO's work provides important insight on matters such as best practices to be shared and benchmarked and how government and nongovernmental partners can become better aligned to achieve important outcomes for the nation. In addition, GAO provides Congress with foresight by highlighting the long-term implications of today's decisions and identifying key trends and emerging challenges facing our nation before they reach crisis proportions. For this hearing, GAO was asked to (1) highlight governmentwide issues where it has made a major contribution to oversight and could assist the intelligence and other congressional committees in their oversight of the Intelligence Community, and (2) comment on the potential impact on GAO's access to perform audit work on personnel security clearances if the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) were to assume management of this issue from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Given historical challenges to GAO's ability to audit the Intelligence Community's programs and activities, this testimony also discusses GAO's views on Senate bill S. 82, known as the Intelligence Community Audit Act of 2007.