WASHINGTON — A measure to strip a government watchdog’s ability to conduct oversight of US covert action programs is expected to pass Congress as early as this week as part of a larger must-pass budget bill.
The measure is a jab at the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent executive branch agency whose job is to ensure that the government’s counterterrorism programs respect Americans’ privacy and civil liberties.
The board’s chairman, David Medine, upset the committee’s GOP members with an essay he coauthored in April that suggested that an independent review panel was needed to assess whether the government’s decisions to target US citizens in drone strikes are appropriate. The essay also said that the board would be a good candidate to serve as the review board.
The committee majority saw that suggestion along with other reviews the board was undertaking, as ‘‘mission creep,’’ one aide said at the time. Committee chairman Devin Nunes, Republican from California, said then that the provision was to ensure that the privacy board members ‘‘stay in their lane.’’
But Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat from Oregon, a member of the Senate intelligence committee, said the measure is ‘‘clearly unwise.’’ Though the board’s oversight activities to date have not focused on covert action, he said, ‘‘it is reasonably easy to envision a covert action program that could have a significant impact on Americans’ privacy and civil liberties — for example, if it included a significant surveillance component.’’
He said that an even larger concern is that the CIA ‘‘could attempt to take advantage of this language . . . and refuse to cooperate with investigations of its surveillance activities by arguing that those activities were somehow connected to a covert action program.’’
He added: ‘‘In my 15 years on the intelligence committee I have repeatedly seen senior CIA officials go to striking lengths to resist external oversight of their activities. . . . Congress should be making it harder, not easier, for intelligence officials to stymie independent oversight.’’
The American Civil Liberties Union legislative counsel Neema Singh Guliani also knocked the measure.
The measure passed the House earlier this year as part of the 2016 intelligence authorization, but the Senate did not include it in its version, and so the measure died. It was revived and attached to the budget bill this week.