The U.S. House Intelligence Committee has authorized U.S. intelligence agencies to spend an estimated 48 billion U.S. dollars in the 2008 fiscal year, the largest amount ever included in an intelligence bill, The Washington Post reported Friday.

The exact numbers in the bill, approved Monday evening, are classified, but intelligence experts estimate that it has grown by nearly 4 percent annually in recent years, the report said.

The committee added to the Bush administration's funding request for "human intelligence" activities by the CIA and the Defense Department.

In addition, money was allocated for language training for collectors and analysts and in language translation capabilities and for sending additional analysts overseas, Representative Silvestre Reyes, the committee's chairman, was quoted as saying.

Committee Democrats cut back on a group of classified CIA programs for Iraq that Reyes described as a wasteful "wish list" that lacks a "real strategy or metrics for evaluating its effectiveness," but Republicans criticized the cuts to classified CIA programs "designed to help America fight and succeed in the conflict against radical jihadists," according to the report.

In the past two years, the U.S. Congress has failed to pass an intelligence authorization bill, the Post report said.

Source: Xinhua