Counterterrorism Blog

Three members of the House Financial Services Committee, including Chairman Barney Frank, introduced a bill to improve coordination between the major players in counterterrorism financing, particularly Treasury and State. The bill (click here for the full-text) essentially requires the departments to play nicely together. The bill's aim can be summarized in one paragraph from Sec. 3 (a) starting on page 6:

The Secretary of State and the Secretary of the Treasury shall negotiate and enter into a Memorandum of Agreement (hereafter in this section referred to as the ‘‘Agreement’’) specifying the role of each of the Secretary’s respective Department in the delivery of counterterrorism financing training and technical assistance provided to countries abroad (without regard to whether any country is designated as a priority country or a nonpriority country by the Terrorist Financing Working Group).

Enabling other countries to effectively police their financial systems is critical to preventing terrorists from using the international financial network. Granted State and Treasury are historically sclerotic bureaucracies with competing priorities, but that Congress feels the need to order the Secretaries of State and Treasury to coordinate on this essential issue is hardly a good sign. The bill might be dismissed as a bit of low-cost grandstanding, but it was inspired by an October 2005 GAO report: Terrorist Financing: Better Strategic Planning Needed to Coordinate U.S. Efforts to Deliver Counter-Terrorism Financing and Technical Assistance Abroad that details ongoing failures of relevant agencies to agree. The Administration, unsurprisingly, claims that it has improved its mechanisms for coordination, but on issues of inter-agency operations this Administration has not earned the benefit of the doubt.