A White House investigation into the CIA’s secret spending is hitting a wall at the spy agency, according to a new report.
The Office of Management and Budget, led by Director Russell Vought, has been reviewing the intelligence agencies’ “black budget” – spending and requests kept out of public reports – to find out whether money has been misspent over years of clandestine operations, four people with knowledge of the review told NBC News.
The CIA hasn’t made it easy, two of those people said. One said that when OMB set up meetings with the agency, CIA employees would often come empty-handed, without answers to the questions the budget office had asked.
The CIA flatly denied that.
“These allegations are demonstrably false and inaccurate,” a CIA spokesperson said.
The scrutiny has sped up since the arrest of David Rush, the former senior CIA officer who pleaded guilty last month to swindling U.S. officials and contractors out of nearly $200 million in cash and luxury items by creating fake government authorities, including a phony top-secret program.
FBI agents found $40 million in gold bars at his home. Rush also admitted buying more than $170 million in South Florida luxury real estate through limited liability companies, and revealing the identity of a clandestine source to a foreign government official.
One person familiar with the White House inquiry said Rush’s case was “just the tip of the iceberg.”
When Trump tapped Vought to lead OMB, he said he wanted him to “dismantle the deep state.” In early 2025, Vought commissioned a small team to look into the opaque intelligence budgets, according to one source. Two people who know Vought well said he has long criticized the spy agencies’ ability to spend with little oversight.
There are limits to what OMB can do. The office controls how appropriated money is handed out, but it isn’t a law enforcement agency and can’t compel anyone to talk. It’s also unclear what the team has found, partly because the review involves classified programs.
The White House didn’t address the friction directly, but a spokesperson insisted that “efforts by the legacy media to sow internal division is a distraction that will not work,” and that every agency is “in lockstep” with Trump.
For fiscal 2026, intelligence agencies requested $115.5 billion, about 11 percent of the total defense budget. The public sees only the topline figure.
Rush faces up to 20 years in prison when he’s sentenced in January.
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