Meanwhile, several bills have already been introduced reflecting varying approaches to the reorganization, including separate drafts from Goss and Harman that would invest the job with budgetary authority but differ on who would head the intelligence community.
Although it is too early to tell what Congress will do on these issues, lawmakers say there appears to be considerable support for giving the director broad budgetary authority but, unlike the commission's recommendation, removing the position from the executive office of the president.
But there are also important unresolved questions, such as how the director could assume such a broad array of new responsibilities, what the director's relationship to the defense secretary would be and who would brief the president on intelligence matters. "There are a lot of questions, serious questions," said Sen. Carl M. Levin (Mich.), ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee.
Despite their rush to address executive-branch reorganization, neither house has taken any concrete steps to deal with the proposals for Congress. In the Senate, Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) said they will create a bipartisan task force to deal with the issue but have yet to appoint it. House GOP leaders may not move on congressional reorganization until after the elections, according to Stuart Roy, spokesman for Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.).
Some argue that congressional changes cannot be made intelligently until executive-branch reforms are nailed down, whereas others say the issues must go together to assure effective oversight. Still others point to the turf issues. "It's extraordinarily difficult to reorganize the executive branch, but that is going to be a piece of cake compared to reorganizing Congress," Collins said.
As the election approaches, many lawmakers are worried that the whole debate could get subsumed by politics. While the Senate has been working on a bipartisan basis, House GOP leaders acted unilaterally in laying out the timetable for action, and Democrats responded by scheduling a special party caucus for Tuesday to consider the proposals.
The political implications deepened earlier this month when Kerry, after endorsing the commission's recommendations in their entirety, urged Bush to call Congress back into session to consider them this month. Bush rejected the proposal but urged action in September.
House Republican leaders are considering breaking the proposals into several packages, starting with a highly symbolic installment to be passed by Sept. 11 and leaving the most controversial proposals for later. One step they could take quickly would be to establish the proposed counterterrorism center by merging the CIA's Terrorist Threat Integration Center and Counterterrorist Center. Those units, along with a portion of the FBI's Counterterrorism Center, are already working together.
But others, including key senators and government officials, oppose a piecemeal approach. "If we're going to do this, we should do this in one piece for the well-being of the people that do the work," J. Cofer Black, the State Department's counterterrorism coordinator, told the House intelligence committee last week.
