![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
government agencies?
I'm working on a movie script, and I need some information. Someone want to explain how the government works for me?
Okay, how about just where I can learn about some structuring, who handles what? Currently, the director of a rather special school is being handled by an agency, perhaps shadowy, which funds him to train young telepaths for gov't use. A situation comes up where it seems he might be directing the kids to cause chaos, or where the chaos might be home-grown terrorism and the kids might be of use in stopping it.
What agency might be funding him to begin with? What agency(s) would be involved if there's the possibility of domestic terrorism? Would the case be "handed off" to the new agency, or would they collaborate?
Okay, how about just where I can learn about some structuring, who handles what? Currently, the director of a rather special school is being handled by an agency, perhaps shadowy, which funds him to train young telepaths for gov't use. A situation comes up where it seems he might be directing the kids to cause chaos, or where the chaos might be home-grown terrorism and the kids might be of use in stopping it.
What agency might be funding him to begin with? What agency(s) would be involved if there's the possibility of domestic terrorism? Would the case be "handed off" to the new agency, or would they collaborate?
no subject
no subject
What agency(s) would be involved if there’s the possibility of domestic terrorism?
Homeland Security (http://www.dhs.gov/), if this is happening nowadays.
What agency might be funding him to begin with?
it probably depends on what sort of “use” the kids are being trained for, but roughly it would break down to the following:
but given that this is all shadowy and, i can’t help but think that the funding for this research must be being channeled through DARPA (http://www.darpa.mil/), since that’s basically the government agency in charge of Mad Science.
-steve
no subject
Feel free to invent an agency and call it the uber-classified sooper-seekrit agency. There's precedent: some years ago--easily within memories of many of my colleagues--the very existence of the NSA was classified. (If you had to go there for a meeting, you were supposed to just tell people you were going "back East", "to the office", or something similarly vague. The CIA's training facility is called The Farm for, I suspect, similar reasons.) I would bet large sums of money that there is right now a sooper-seekrit spy agency whose existence is unknown to us mere mortals.
Those intelligence agencies whose existence IS known to us mere mortals call themselves the intelligence community (http://www.intelligence.gov/index.shtml). There's a dozen or so agencies, from the well-known players like the FBI, CIA, and NSA to some more stealthy ones like the NRO (National Reconnaissance Office; getting to be a major player in intel). Also, all five branches of the service have their own intel offices.
Warm and fuzzy notions of "community" aside, all agencies are deeply suspicious of all other agencies, and may or may not share intel. (This is a huge problem. It's thought that 9/11 might have been preventable if the different intel agencies had compared notes. (That, and if Bush hadn't committed dereliction of duty, but I digress.))
Would the case be "handed off" to the new agency, or would they collaborate?
Honestly--and I wish I were kidding about this--the most likely scenario is that the two agencies would squabble about whose telepaths they were: who funds them, and out of which pots of money, and why that entitles Agency A to be in charge instead of Agency B.
no subject
HAHAHAHAHA.... *wipes away tears*
Ok, more seriously, I agree with the stuff the other people have already posted. Your first key decision is whether it's a civilian project (very likely given you said it's a school) or a miltary one. Military means deciding which branch and then fitting it into the chain of command somewhere. I'll presume you mean civilian, though.
It's essentially a given that you're talking about the executive branch, so your first decision is which top level department owns the project. As your other posters have suggested, your big choices here are going to be Homeland Security, Defense, and (good thought, [Bad username or site: hakamadare'/ @ livejournal.com]) Treasury. Since it's a school, there's also Education as a possibility, especially if it grew out of a legitimate educational initiative. Every department has its own internal organization which owes more to historical artifacts and turf fights than any actual Earth logic.
Within and between departments, the bureaucracy is very prone to turf fights over money, headcount, blame, and responsibility. How bad that gets depends a lot on the quality of local middle management and degree of visibility to oversight.
A lot of the organization will be driving by how it's all getting paid for. Anything very secret and/or dirty will probably be a "black" project... that is, one which is not publicly acknowledged and whose budget is concealed. Any department could manage its money creatively and hide something... "the $20M for owl vomit studies is really being diverted to my a mutant chimp project". Agencies that are supposed to be up to secret stuff (e.g. the CIA) will have a non line-itemed budget for all their black projects ("we need $1.6B, don't ask why"). While Congress is expected to approve this budget without asking, a small oversight group does get to examine the real internal budget, and Congress is basically trusting that group's approval of the aggregated blob.
Within the actual intelligence agencies which report variously to Homeland Security, Defense, Treasury, State, and the military you can make up your own or use the existing ones. In theory, all of them have quasi-non-overlapping charters and are supposed to play nicely with the others. In practice, they often poach on each other's turf and don't share information well. This is primarily caused by rival political interests and lack of trust. It's tolerated, though, out of a vague feeling that it's a good idea for different groups with different chains of command to be keeping an eye on each other. Broadly speaking, some of the main charters are:
no subject
Another option is that it was a private company which is contracting to the government agency--but I guess that's the school itself.
no subject
no subject
I'll go with
To answer the specific question, though, I'd say it sounds like a subset of the military. Nothing else in the government as it is supposed to be run [1] could keep that degree of control over a group and have virtually no chance of media or other outside oversight.
[1] Yes, I know -- we're not playing 'supposed to.' <sigh>