Congressional Oversight Of National Security: A Mandate For Change

The CSIS Project on Congressional Oversight of Defence has attempted to forge a bipartisan mandate to reform the way Congress handles its defence oversight. Congress itself has long recognized that it spends too much time on details of defence programs and too little time deliberating the objectives, policies and management of US national security. This report, phase III of CSIS’s research on defence reform, builds on the Center’s previous analyses. Phase I assessed the implementation of the Packard Commission recommendations and the Goldwater-Nichols legislation, while phase II focused on the Bush administraton and the 101st Congress.