WASHINGTON – U.S. Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-VA), Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, released a statement after the Senate approved the Intelligence Authorization Act (IAA) for Fiscal Year 2025 as part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), sending the legislation to the president’s desk for his signature. The IAA authorizes funding, provides legal authorities, and enhances congressional oversight of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC).

“The annual intelligence authorization bill helps ensure that intelligence agencies have the authorities and resources they need to protect against rapidly evolving conflicts and threats,” said Chairman Warner. “This year’s IAA enhances the IC’s ability to identify and counter emerging technological threats posed by adversarial nations, including foreign adversaries’ efforts to use and dominate areas like artificial intelligence and biotechnology. The IAA also improves engagement between the IC and the private sector, promotes designations of foreign ransomware organizations as hostile cyber actors and furthers the Committee’s efforts to ensure the IC can attract and expeditiously on-board a talented, diverse, and trusted workforce to meet the emerging challenges we face.”  

Background:

The IAA for Fiscal Year 2025 authorizes funding for the IC and ensures that it has the resources, personnel, and authorities it needs to protect our country and inform decision makers, while ensuring continued robust congressional oversight. The bill’s provisions focus on the following key areas:

• Increases oversight of the national security threats posed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC), including its attempts to evade sanctions, as well as its military capabilities, and investments in, and attempts to dominate, supply chains. 
• Enhances the IC’s ability to identify and counter adversary threats relating to biotechnologies, including by improving and modernizing the roles, missions, and objectives of the National Counterproliferation and Biosecurity Center and by standardizing the IC’s processes for collecting and analyzing biological data.  
• Improves the IC’s response to foreign ransomware organizations, including by promoting the designation of leading ransomware groups as hostile foreign cyber actors.
• Enhances policies relating to AI, including by establishing an AI Security Center within the National Security Agency to advance AI security research.
• Expands the IC’s ability to procure, transition, and incorporate emerging technologies, including by enhancing public-private talent exchanges.
• Increases the IC’s focus on the growing threats to the United States by ISIS and affiliated terrorist organizations.
• Requires the Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence of the Department of Energy to advise National Laboratories regarding visitors and assignees who pose counterintelligence risks.
• Builds upon the Committee’s efforts relating to energy security by requiring a strategy to improve information sharing between the IC and the private sector regarding foreign adversary-based threats to U.S. critical minerals and other energy-related projects abroad.
• Requires the IC to conduct an assessment of the likely course of Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine, and the effects of Western support to Ukraine.
• Requires the IC to conduct an assessment of the lessons learned by the IC with respect to the Israel-Hamas war.
• Improves oversight related to the Western Hemisphere, specifically when it comes to national security implications of visa-free travel by certain foreign nationals.
• Enhances insight into the Venezuela Maduro regime’s relationship with state sponsors of terrorism and foreign terrorist organizations.
• Increases support for IC recruitment and integration.
• Extends the requirement for annual reports on strikes against terrorist targets.
• Requires a Government Accountability Office (GAO) review of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office regarding unidentified anomalous phenomena reporting and Federal agency coordination.
• Reforms management of controlled access programs to improve congressional oversight.
• Maintains strong congressional oversight of and enhances protections for IC whistleblowers.

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