Defund the FBI, CIA, NSA, ATF, and DEA. They've proven themselves to cause more trouble than to solve problems.
If you modernize federal drug laws the DEA would lose at lot of its teeth. It’s up to the legislatures to change laws and take power away from federal agencies.
That's precisely what would happen. Look at what's become of the IRS. It's been systematically defunded, despite the fact that the government sees a huge return on investment when they spend dollars there. The IRS has stated publicly that they only go after middle and lower-class citizen offenders because they can't afford to investigate and prosecute the big corporations and oligarchs which are where the vast majority of tax fraud takes place (note: not avoidance, fraud). This is pretty clearly by design.
The good news is with the new "investment" of my tax dollars into the tax and audit arm of the government, they can no go after the top tax dollars AND middle and lower-class citizen "offenders"! Yea!
Let's kill the income tax entirely, it's a completely unfair system. Middle and lower class would thrive, and the "big guys" would not notice because none of their real "income" is taxed, it's designed not to be taxed.
Income tax can be seen as a tax on companies that can't be embezzled. Most people are honest and want to see their full income on documents so a company has to pay the full amount of the taxes.
This leaves the lower and middle classes with less money, but it also forces the market to offer the goods for less.
The alternative would be taxing the companies directly. People would earn more, but companies would also request more for their goods because they have to pay more taxes. But would the tax payout be the same if companies have an even bigger incentive to hide their profits?
Black-and-white thinking leads to very inefficient outcomes.
That is, it makes a lot more sense to reign-in, reform, and redirect intelligence and policing agencies than get rid of them.
I think we want to work on how to align their interests -- as individual agents, intermediate commanding officers, and agency-wide -- with ours as citizens.
But there are other possible reforms, for example, I'd want them to record all interviews (which is currently against policy last I knew) instead of relying on FD-302s.
And I'd like their case management system put under the control of an independent agency that will audit for things like missing Woods files, so they can't just go "oops" on stuff like that. And if they delete something, someone else gets to restore it from backup and report to the courts who did the deletion and when according to the audit logs.
I'd do similar things with police body cam footage. It should not be under the control of the police and if someone has a habit of never turning theirs on, it should be addressed and the cop reprimanded long before it impacts a case.
Same goes for jail footage, as well. So "oops" Epstein's cell camera died just can't be a thing, because it's not under their control at all and they address such things right away, not just when it's a problem.
• Down-classify everything by 1 designation. Top Secret / Secure Compartmentalized Information becomes Top Secret. Top Secret becomes Secret. Secret becomes Declassified. (I've heard overclassification decreases trust in government)
• Shorten the maximum secrecy timespan (some information is kept secret 50+ years to avoid political blowback against operations that the public would find inexcusable)
• Shorten the average secrecy timespan (see above)
• Ban ISP's from collecting, retaining, distributing, and selling netflow metadata.
• Ban all government agencies from bypassing fourth amendment by way of purchasing surveillance from private organizations.
Edit: if you're going to downvote someone for brainstorming less extreme ideas (not suggestions/demands) as a response to more extreme ideas, please at least offer criticism of the ideas themselves.
Organization that operate secretly will always provide some refuge for corruption. There are always blind spots for management.
If the public has no input, how can we ever trust them?
How would we be able to audit an organization (in a timely manner) that puts up as many roadblocks as possible?
The Fed needs to be audited, too. As well as their staff, starting at the very top.
It seems in the government, secrecy and corruption is the name of the game. That's unacceptable and needs to end. The US taxpayer should demand full transparency of all organizations including intelligence services, and the agencies in question should have no choice but to fully comply except in genuine, individual cases of legitimate national security, which would be assessed by an independent reviewer.
Accountability is further complicated by the fact that the entity is political in nature, so the FBI has actual partisan backing through politicians, the court system, and even down to individual jurists.
I honestly don't know what the solution is myself.
The fact that the head of the FBI is an appointee of an elected official, there is some public accountability through voters if there is enough transparency to inform voters of what is going on.
I suppose the same is true for most local police though. As it stands, we don’t get much transparency. For a democracy to work properly, the public needs to be informed. The stonewalling by law enforcement at all levels prevents the public from holding them accountable.
You cite transparency, which is one aspect- but the other interesting problem is the incestuous relationship that our intel agencies have with the media as well.
How much political news coverage was shaped by "anonymous sources" from these intel agencies?
I forget who it was- but I remember one retired agent speaking pretty casually about how the FBI leaks information to journalists by sharing information with retired agents that still hold their clearances.
* Federal level police (should be policing state/local too).
* Intelligence gathering
* Cyber security
They need more daylight/oversight and a lot more accountability. The DEA can go to hell (legalize all drugs) and the ATF can pound sand (their subjects of interest could be rolled into the FBI).
We need a happy medium between the excesses we have today and having none of those needs addressed.
They've solved thousands of missing childen, sexual predators, kidnappings, etc
CIA tortures people overseas. EDIT: CIA also arms militia groups that are against, or later turn on, American interests.
NSA has a habit of spying on every American. (Remember Snowden?)
ATF enforces all the weird gun laws, like how an AR15 is sometimes a handgun.[2] It also engages in sieges that end up killing kids.[0] [1]
DEA is all about the failed war on drugs.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Ridge
Not just "defund", but "abolish".