Senate panel grills ODNI's future Number Two, David Gompert

Two months ago, President Obama nominated David Gompert to be the Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, serving as the number two man behind Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair.

Yesterday, Gompert faced a generally favorable inquisition from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which held a relatively brief confirmation hearing on his nomination.

Gompert is a 30-year veteran of national security matters, whose most recent job was as a senior fellow at the RAND Corporation. He's served in such top jobs as the National Defense University; the Coalition Provisional Authority running Iraq in the days following the war several years ago; the National Security Council staff during the Bush 41 presidency; and the State Department under Henry Kissinger.

He also has ties to the corporate world, having worked 6 years for AT&T.

So it was, with that background, that Gompert went before the Intelligence Committee for his confirmation hearing yesterday. Of interest to committee chair Sen. Diane Feinstein (D.-Calif.) was how Gompert and DNI Blair planned on dividing the work of running the Intelligence Community and learned that the two have come to an unusual mutually-agreed to arrangement.

Normally, the top man in most government agencies is responsible for such tasks as the President's Daily National Security Briefing, testimony before Senate oversight committees and external matters, while his deputy focuses on day-to-day internal matters, including daily management of the agency.

Director Blair has decided on a somewhat different division of labor in our case, given my broad background in national security, policymaking, and bringing policy to bear on the process. He feels that I could be of greatest use to him and the community and the nation by being heavily involved in the interagency process, bringing our intelligence products to bear on policy-making. That would give him that much more time to concentrate on the daunting task of integrating and transforming the intelligence community.

This past July, DNI Blair told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that the Intelligence Community would be reducing significantly its use of outside contractors, and taking "inherently governmental" work and assigning it to Federal workers.

Chairman Feinstein reminded Gompert that her committee has doubled the cut in the Intelligence Community's budget for contractors from five to ten percent in the current fiscal year.

In response, Gompert told the panel that, "Everytime someone approaches me and says that we have to use a contractor because we lack certain governmental capabilities to perform a task, the question I will ask is 'Should we have those capabilities?', and "what steps including coming to Congress (do we need) to have those capabilities for the future?"

Gompert says he agrees with the committee's -- and Director Blair's -- commitment to substantially reduce the number of outside contractors.

There's no word on when the full Intelligence Committee will vote on David Gompert's nomination to be Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence.

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