Page:CRS Report 98-611.djvu/12

CRS-12 directives in this series, the first such instrument, dated February 13, 2001, and approved for public release by the National Security Council staff on March 13, indicates that they are denominated National Security Presidential Directives (NSPDs) and may serve double duty for both decision and review purposes. The initial NSPD pertained to the organization of National Security Council policy and coordination subgroups. By late November 2008, 59 of these directives had been issued. Some, like NSPD-41 (HSPD-13), NSPD-43 (HSPD-14), NSPD-47 (HSPD-16), NSPD-51 (HSPD-20), and NSPD-59 (HSPD-24) were also issued concurrently as Homeland Security Presidential Directives.

Presidential Announcements

An oral presidential directive oftentimes is captured in an announcement which records what the President has prescribed or instructed. For example, President Richard Nixon established his Advisory Council on Executive Organization in this manner, with a April 5, 1969, announcement, as did President William Clinton when he inaugurated his National Performance Review task force on March 3, 1993. By contrast, such temporary government reform study panels were mandated on various occasions during the first half of the twentieth century and during the Reagan Administration with written charters expressed in statutes or executive orders. Such presidential announcements, as in the examples cited, often are recorded in the Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, a presidential gazette launched in the summer of 1965 and published 52 times a year. However, they do not appear in the Federal Register or in the Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, produced by the National Archives for Presidents Herbert Hoover, Harry S. Truman, and the Chief Executives succeeding Truman.

Presidential Findings

Presidential findings, as such, initially appeared in the Federal Register and CFR Title 3 compilations as instruments determining that certain conditions of the Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act of 1954, as amended, had been satisfied and, therefore, sales of agricultural commodities could proceed. Presidential findings of this type were reproduced in CFR Title compilations as administrative orders. In 1974, the reference to a presidential finding took on its current popular meaning when Congress adopted the so-called Hughes-Ryan amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act of that year. Set out in section 662 of the statute, it prohibited the expenditure of appropriated funds by or on behalf of the Central Intelligence Agency for intelligence activities “unless and until the President finds that each such operation is important to the national security of the United States and reports, in a timely fashion, a description and scope of such operation to the