You're not a real government agency until you have an intelligence branch. The Department of Agriculture gets funding in defense bills (because, ahem, America gets angry when our cows get mad).
Seriously, though, there are something like two dozen intelligence services [edit: Wiki says 16 big ones] in the US federal government.
No, but Agriculture does have top secret-cleared foreign service personnel (Foreign Agricultural Service and APHIS). They probably have at least a soft intelligence role for foreign markets and trade deals.
Thing is, they're not, as we discovered when the Snowden revelations came to light. Intelligence agencies do, in fact, operate without proper oversight, and are run by means of informal channels to private interests with overseas assets to protect. That's been true since the Dulles brothers.
The intelligence agencies are not under "the presidents control". They are authorized and funded by congress. They exist to provide intelligence to various congressional committees like the senate intelligence committee.
For anyone who doesn't know this already (I didn't), I looked up NED's website and it says it's a private organization, but that it is funded mostly by the State Department. So, not intelligence agencies.
These are all standard practice even for the unclassified parts of intelligence agencies, which is probably where they borrowed it from. Now applied to the Department of Agriculture.
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