Budget
The overall U.S. intelligence budget has been considered classified until recently. There have been numerous attempts to obtain general information about the budget. As a result, it was revealed that CIA's annual budget in Fiscal Year 1963 was US $550 million (inflation-adjusted US$ 4.2 billion in 2012), and the overall intelligence budget in FY 1997 was US $26.6 billion (inflation-adjusted US$ 38.5 billion in 2012). There have also been accidental disclosures; for instance, Mary Margaret Graham, a former CIA official and deputy director of national intelligence for collection in 2005, said that the annual intelligence budget was $44 billion.
In Legacy of Ashes-The History of the CIA, Tim Weiner claims that early funding was solicited by James Forrestal and Allen Dulles from private Wall Street and Washington, D.C. sources. Next Forrestal convinced "an old chum," John W. Snyder, the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and one of Truman's closest allies, to allow the use of the $200 million Exchange Stabilization Fund by CIA fronts to influence European elections, beginning with Italy After the Marshall Plan was approved, appropriating $13.7 billion over five years, 5% of those funds or $685 million were made available to the CIA.
Read more about this topic: Central Intelligence Agency
Famous quotes containing the word budget:
“You can fool all the people all the time if the advertising is right and the budget is big enough.”
—Joseph E. Levine (b. 1905)
“We might come closer to balancing the Budget if all of us lived closer to the Commandments and the Golden Rule.”
—Ronald Reagan (b. 1911)
“The United States is the only great nation whose government is operated without a budget. The fact is to be the more striking when it is considered that budgets and budget procedures are the outgrowth of democratic doctrines and have an important part in developing the modern constitutional rights.... The constitutional purpose of a budget is to make government responsive to public opinion and responsible for its acts.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)