frenchmanflats wrote:
We also cut the budgets of the NSA and the FBI because we have a President that does not like these agencies. That cut the number of agents investigating terrorist cells and radical Imams. Now, Congress is going to fix it.
Two facts:
1. You don't know what the budget of the NSA is or whether it has been cut in any particular year. If you were one of the people who did know this, discussing it in a public forum would be a crime. The only public source of substantive information about the NSA's budget comes from Edward Snowden and covers a time period outside the scope of your comment.
Congress did act to cut specific types of expenditure by the NSA, but that doesn't mean the overall budget was cut and that Congressional action was not somehow a reflection of the will of President Obama.
http://www.wired.com/2014/06/house-vote ... veillance/2. The FBI has been hurt by the budget cuts forced on it by a dysfunctional congress, not because of the whims of the President. The specific mechanism that forced these witless, automatic budget cuts is sequestration, a device that an earlier dysfunctional Congress created to try to force itself into rational compromise on the budget (something the institution is still having extreme difficulty in doing.)
Given these facts, it might be unwise to put much faith in Congress to somehow fix the budget or properly fund the FBI, NSA or counter terror surveillance.