The Spy Chief's New Financial Power

The brief entry in the Federal Register, dated May 5, 2006, was opaque to the untrained eye. But the bureaucratic verbiage added up to this: President George W. Bush has bestowed on his intelligence czar, John D. Negroponte, broad authority, in the name of national security, to excuse publicly traded companies from certain accounting and securities-disclosure obligations.

Unbeknownst to most of the financial world, Bush and every President since Jimmy Carter has had the authority under a 1977 statute to exempt companies working on secret defense projects from portions of the 1934 Securities Exchange Act. Administration officials told BusinessWeek they believe this is the first time a President has delegated that power to someone outside the Oval Office.