President Bush and his senior aides are studying ways to give a new national intelligence director “effective authority” over the U.S. intelligence community, including budgetary authority, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said yesterday. Asked whether the president would give budgetary and hiring-and-firing authority to the holder of the new position, Rice told NBC’s “Meet the Press,” “The only thing that he’s taken off the table [is] that this person shouldn’t be in the White House and shouldn’t be part of the Cabinet.” Full Story