Porter Goss - Government Career

Government Career

After retiring from the CIA, Goss moved to Sanibel, a resort town off the coast of Fort Myers. In 1974, he was elected to the City Council and was elected mayor by the council. In 1983, Bob Graham, then Governor of Florida, appointed Goss to the Lee County Board of Commissioners.

In 1988 Goss ran for Congress in what was then the 13th congressional district of Florida. The seat was vacated by Connie Mack III when Mack ran successfully for the U. S. Senate. In the Republican primary—the real contest in this heavily Republican district—Goss's main opponent was Louis A. "Skip" Bafalis, who had represented the district for 10 years before making an unsuccessful bid for governor. Bafalis was initially heavily favored due to his name recognition. However, he only garnered 29% of the vote in the primary to Goss's 38%, largely due to the fact that Goss's campaign was much better financed. Goss went on to defeat Bafalis handily in the runoff election. In the general election, Goss faced the former first president of Common Cause, Jack T. Conway. Goss won in a rout, taking 71 percent of the vote. He was easily reelected seven times. The district was so heavily Republican that Goss only faced a Democrat one other time, in 1996; he won with 73 percent of the vote. He was unopposed for reelection in 1990, 1994 and 1998.

In Congress, Goss had a mostly conservative voting record. However, he tended to be much more supportive of environmental legislation than most of his fellow Republicans. For instance, he supported the Kyoto Protocol and strengthening the Environmental Protection Agency. Most of his major legislation has been intelligence authorization bills, with some local constituent-services bills.

The legislation he sponsored include: a constitutional amendment to establish term limits limiting representatives to no more than three consecutive terms of four years. Major bills sponsored by Goss include a bill to limit Congressional pay raises to no more than Social Security cost-of-living adjustments (unpassed), The Public Interest Declassification Act of 1999 (unpassed), and the USA PATRIOT Act.

He served in Congress for 16 years until his appointment by President George W. Bush to be Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). While in the House, Goss served as chair of the House Intelligence Committee from 1997 until 2005 and the vice-chairman of the House Rules Committee. He also helped establish and served on the Homeland Security Committee. As a congressman, Goss consistently and emphatically defended the CIA and supported strong budget increases for the Agency, even during a time of tight budgets and Clintonian slashes to other parts of the intelligence budgets. In mid-2004, Goss took a very strong position, during what had already been announced as his last congressional term, urging specific reforms and corrections in the way the CIA carried out its activities, lest it become "just another government bureaucracy."