Intelligence is only worth what you can leverage it for. Knowing a stock is going up tomorrow by 5% isn’t worth much for most people, but it’s worth a far more to someone who can toss 100m into it.

America has a vast economy, huge military R&D spending, massive foreign entanglements etc, and it’s arguable if the CIA is worth its budget. I’m not arguing it should be defunded, but there’s been significant debate even within the intelligence community around the topic for a bunch of different reasons.

Scale that down to a developing country with 10 million people and human intelligence gathering within foreign countries is almost guaranteed to be a waste of time and money.