WASHINGTON — Pressure to overhaul the FBI mounted Tuesday when House budget negotiators ordered the bureau to embrace the recommendations of a presidential commission on intelligence failures that would likely erode the FBI's independence.
The powerful House Appropriations Committee acted a day after a former member of another commission, the bipartisan panel that investigated the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, expressed concern that the FBI had failed to make sufficient progress in recasting itself since the attacks in New York and at the Pentagon.
Tuesday's action by the normally supportive congressional committee, in language attached to an FBI budget bill, sends a blunt message to the bureau that lawmakers consider the progress to be unacceptable.
It sets up a battle as early as next week, when the House is expected to take up the Justice Department budget.
The presidential commission on intelligence failures had recommended a restructuring of the FBI under which thousands of counterterrorism and counterintelligence agents and analysts would be accountable to an outside agency under the intelligence reform law Congress approved last year.
Without the change, critics say, only a fraction of the bureau's intelligence-related resources would be affected by the law.
An FBI spokesman declined comment on Tuesday's action.
FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III told a Senate committee last month that the bureau was reviewing the commission's recommendations, saying the proposals made "a significant contribution to understanding ways we can improve our intelligence capabilities."
But Mueller and other officials have also strongly defended the steps they have taken to remake the bureau after the Sept. 11 attacks, and were believed to be seeking more time to allow the moves to work before launching a more radical restructuring.
The Justice Department also declined comment.
But a former Justice Department official who has been tracking the proposals called the panel's action "a shot across the bow" by the lawmakers who control the purse strings.
"You never [mess] with your budget guys -- even if they tell you to run naked down Pennsylvania Avenue," said the former official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Even so, "I think the bureau will lobby like mad to get that knocked out."
