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26 August 2015

New Report on Intelligence Contractor Oversight

Steven Aftergood
August 24, 2015

Intelligence Contractor Oversight, and More from CRS

Effective oversight of intelligence community contractors is a particularly difficult exercise since the reliability of official data on contractor activities is uncertain and most of it is classified and inaccessible to outsiders, a new report from the Congressional Research Service explains.

“Contractors have been and are an integral part of the intelligence community’s (IC’s) total workforce (which also includes federal employees and military personnel). Yet questions have been raised regarding how they are used, and the size and cost of the contractor component.”

The new CRS report “describes several initiatives designed, or used, to track contractors or contractor employees. [It also] addresses the questions of whether IC contractor personnel are performing inherently governmental functions and whether the IC’s acquisition workforce is equipped to monitor contractors performing critical functions….”


The CRS report itself was prepared without access to classified data on the role of contractors, so it sheds no new factual light on the subject. Instead, it summarizes the recent literature on internal IC contractor management and congressional oversight of IC contractors. See The Intelligence Community and Its Use of Contractors: Congressional Oversight Issues, August 18, 2015.

Dozens of other new and updated CRS reports were obtained and posted online last week, including these:


China’s Currency Devaluation, CRS Insights, August 17, 2015




Medal of Honor: History and Issues, updated August 18, 2015







Women in Combat: Issues for Congress, updated August 18, 2015


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