Introduction: The Central Intelligence Agencys Budget? What Budget?
The US Constitution seemingly requires that a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time (Art. I, sec. 9, cl. 7 [emphasis added]). Now, suppose you want to know how much the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) spends and on what. Suppose further that you suspect the CIA is spending your hard-earned tax and deficit dollars wastefully or on ille- gal domestic surveillance. A logical first step would be to take a look at the CIAs budgetthe account of receipts and expenditures mentioned in the Constitution. However, one would search in vain. The CIAs budget is secret, and under the Central Intelligence Act of 1949, it accounts to the Treasury for its expenditures by a nonpublic certificate.
In the 1970s, William Richardson, a member of the electorate, loyal cit- izen, and taxpayer, sued to have the CIA Act declared unconstitutional. A lawyer with a background in military intelligence, he was apparently incensed by the CIAs secretive domestic spending (Wharton 1995). He had a dual constitutional complaint. On the one hand, he could not obtain the CIAs budget; on the other, without the CIAs budget numbers, the Trea- surys published Combined Statements of Receipts, Expenditures, and Balances of the United States was a fraudulent document (United States v. Richardson 1974, 169). How could Richardson be an informed citizen and voter if the government was withholding some budget information from
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Rosenbloom, David H.. Administrative Law for Public Managers, Routledge, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusb/detail.action?docID=1652860. Created from csusb on 2019-10-29 19:03:29.Read the chapter and finish the Chapter Summary. At the end of the summary, please answer the first discussion question on page 150
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