NSA Fails 10 Major Tests Amid Unjustifiable Global Collection
By Marcus Boone ·
Global communications were swept up without justification while millions in assets vanished and internal watchdogs were rotated to protect their own future assignments.
Ten out of sixteen. That is the failing grade the Department of Defense Inspector General handed to the National Security Agency in a February 13, 1996, verification inspection. According to a report mirrored by the FAS Intelligence Resource Program, the agency had spent five years attempting to fix the systemic rot uncovered during its first comprehensive inspection in 1991. By 1996, the watchdog found that the NSA had not adequately corrected the majority of the critical issues it had been ordered to resolve.
The 1991 inspection had been a reckoning. The Inspector General found an agency where growth had not been "centrally managed or planned" and where internal oversight was virtually non-existent. The resulting 1992 report contained 64 recommendations to curb waste and instill a basic level of administrative competence. Five years later, the verification team returned to see if the agency had finally learned how to manage itself. They found that while the NSA had successfully implemented a strategic planning process and cleaned up its security clearance revocations, it remained a chaotic operation in almost every other measurable way.
Unjustifiable Collection
For an agency tasked with the global monitoring and processing of signals intelligence (SIGINT), the most troubling failure is not one of paperwork, but of purpose. The 1996 report notes that the NSA failed to provide "adequate management oversight and accountability for controlling unnecessary and unjustifiable collection duplications."
Because the agency could not control these redundancies, the Inspector General concluded that the NSA was "unable to operate its Collection Evaluation System in an effective and efficient manner." When an organization tasked with the clandestine interception of global communications admits—via its own internal auditors—that its collection is "unjustifiable" and "unnecessary," it suggests a mandate that has expanded far beyond the bounds of efficiency or focused intelligence needs. It describes a vacuum cleaner approach to surveillance, where the lack of oversight allows the agency to gather whatever it wants, regardless of whether the data is redundant or required.
Millions of Dollars in Assets
Beyond the surveillance apparatus, the NSA demonstrated a staggering inability to track its own physical existence. The report is blunt regarding equipment accountability: the agency simply "does not meet DoD equipment accountability standards." The consequence of this administrative void is that the NSA "cannot account for millions of dollars worth of assets."
This failure extended into the agency's financial plumbing. The Inspector General found that the NSA had failed to include basic functions—time and attendance, travel, overtime, and cash management—as assessable units in its Internal Management Control Program. By ignoring these "vulnerable areas," the agency effectively disabled its own "key tool for detection of fraud, waste, and mismanagement."
Even the agency's relationship with the law was haphazard. The report finds that the NSA failed to implement procedures for Economy Act Orders that complied with Department of Defense guidance, leaving the agency in "noncompliance with the Economy Act."\ In the world of high-stakes espionage, the agency appeared to treat federal acquisition regulations as optional suggestions.
Rotating the Inspectors
Perhaps the most cynical finding in the report concerns the very people tasked with keeping the agency honest. The verification inspection looked at the NSA's internal Inspector General and found a structural flaw that rendered the office toothless. The agency regularly rotates its key personnel and inspection staff.
According to the report, this practice means that "independence cannot be assured because these individuals must consider the impact of their work on prospects for future assignments." When the people writing the audits are the same people who must navigate the agency's promotion cycles and assignment boards, the audits become exercises in career preservation rather than accountability. The watchdog is not just house-trained; it is an employee hoping for a better office in the next rotation.
Bureaucracy and NSA
To its credit, the agency did attempt to trim the fat. The record refers to an internal study titled "Bureaucracy and NSA: Management's Views," which examined horizontal and vertical "procedural dysfunctions." This study led to a November 1992 reorganization that slashed the number of deputy directors by 40 percent and middle managers by 29 percent.
Yet, these cuts to the organizational chart did not translate to actual competence. The 1996 report concludes that the NSA still "does not adequately identify its manpower requirements" and remains ignorant of the "total number of manpower requirements by quantity and skill mix to perform its mission."
While the agency provided "responsive comments" suggesting that these problems would eventually be corrected, the record shows a persistent gap between the NSA's clandestine capabilities and its basic institutional discipline. The report leaves open whether the agency's failure to accredit its own computer systems and networks—which it was "unable" to do in accordance with DoD guidance—created security vulnerabilities that the agency's own SIGINT mission was meant to prevent.