A Senate staffer told United Press International that the intelligence committee hoped to hold a hearing on the nomination Thursday, but added that the date was still tentative.

President Bush nominated Maj. Gen. Dale Meyerrose, currently chief information officer for both North American Aerospace Defense Command and Northern Command, to the post on Sept. 8.

The position was created -- and made Senate-confirmable -- by the same intelligence reform law that created the office of the director of national of national intelligence to manage the sprawling and fractious collection of agencies dubbed the intelligence community.

For the law's authors, the chief information officer was a key figure in the reform process the new director of national intelligence was to undertake -- the official in charge of enforcing the new information sharing environment recommended by the Sept. 11 Commission.

The reformers argued the post should be confirmable in order to boost the holder's authority in relation to his counterparts in the agencies themselves -- whom he would need to cajole, bully or persuade into line to make information sharing a reality.

But a provision in the Senate version of the 2006 Intelligence Authorization Bill would strip the job of its Senate-confirmed status.

Brandon Milhorn, senior counsel to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told a recent lawyers' conference that the bill's sponsor, intelligence committee Chairman Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., "doesn't believe that just because someone is an advice and consent employee that they are any more qualified or have more authority or more gravitas, just because."

"It doesn't diminish the importance of the position," he insisted of the provision, section 407 of the bill.

Indeed, supporters of the provision point out that the bill designates the new post explicitly as chief information officer of the whole intelligence community.

"The committee believes that the chief information officer of the intelligence community must provide direction and guidance to all elements of the intelligence community," reads the committee report accompanying the bill, most of which is classified.

There were already plenty of Senate-confirmable positions in the new structure, Milhorn said.

"We don't think we need to provide advice and consent to every officer and employee of the U.S. government," he told the American Bar Association's conference on law and national security earlier this month.

And he implied the large numbers of confirmations required within the new structure might be interfering with the White House's ability to get people in place in a timely manner.

Removing the requirement to go through the advice and consent process, he said, "does give the administration and the director of national intelligence the opportunity to get someone in the job quickly."

The nominee to be general counsel to the director has been held up by Democrat Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan since June, in a dispute about the production of documents he says the committee needs to do its oversight work.

Veteran federal officials point out that the White House Office of Management and Budget in any administration tends to oppose senate conformation of all but the most senior officials.

"They don't like congress getting in the knickers of the executive agencies," said one.

Supporters of the provision also say that senate confirmation for the chief information officer is an anomaly -- there are plenty of more senior officials in the director's office, including his four deputies, who don't require senate confirmation.

Meyerrose, whose nomination will not be affected even if the measure becomes law, declined to comment on the issue or to answer any questions, citing the tradition that nominees remain silent until their confirmation hearings.

According to one former Sept. 11 commission staffer, the position was written as a senate-confirmed one because the chief information officer was to be in charge of implementing information-sharing.

It was "someone the Congress could hold accountable," the former staffer said.

But lawmakers also included in the legislation the recommendation from a different report, that of the Markle Foundation task force on information sharing, to have a specially designated "program manager" do that job.

"Congress muddled things up" by doing that, according to the former staffer.

The White House eventually appointed a former naval intelligence official, John Rusack, to be program manager for information sharing.

But Rusack's post is not where the Markle Foundation recommended it be -- in the Executive Office of, and reporting to, the president. Rather, Rusack works in the office of, and reports to, Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte.

But any complications this might cause for Meyerrose if he is confirmed are likely to pale in significance next to the challenges of dealing with his counterpart chief information officers in the 15 intelligence agencies -- and their home departments.

He is charged with the job of setting polices, standards and strategy for all those agencies; to ensure that -- in the words of the Senate committee report -- "research and development, security and acquisition procedures" for information technology "support information access throughout the intelligence community."

Whatever his role in relation to the program manager, Meyerrose's new post holds the key to the creation of the new information sharing environment -- because he is responsible for the development and acquisition of the communication and information technology under-girding it.

Although the report suggests that the post-holder should employ the budgetary authorities of the director's office to ensure compliance, that kind of policy co-ordination is not going to be easy, observers warn, especially with agencies inside the vast edifice of the Defense Department.

One of Meyerrose's first tasks will be to develop for the intelligence community a so-called enterprise architecture -- an overall blue print or flow chart of how information moves through an organization. But such an architecture "is not just an information technology issue any more, it's a business process issue," says one veteran of federal IT contracting.

Moving from the existing, "as is," architecture to its desired, "to be," replacement is done through capital planning and investment control, the veteran says, cautioning that developing an architecture that can encompass the huge number of different systems and databases employed by the various intelligence agencies and their home departments -- and then ensuring conformity from all of them -- will be a "significant challenge."

And some are concerned that a career military background might not be the best preparation for a role managing the politically complex relationships necessary to get the job done.

"When you bring in somebody who has only served in military positions... they arrive thinking that they are going to issue commands, lay down the law," said one intelligence official.

"What happens if no one listens? What happens if they have to cajole, use the bully pulpit, make cogent arguments to adult civilians? And all they've done for 25 years is give and take orders?" the official asked.

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