Washington ? President Bush endorsed creating a new intelligence czar Monday, but rejected Sept. 11 commission recommendations that the position be Cabinet-level and have control of the purse strings.

“We are a nation in danger,” Bush said, as he called on Congress to authorize the new post that, on paper, would carry sweeping powers to oversee intelligence collection at home and overseas.

The Sept. 11 commission advised the president and lawmakers to create an intelligence director to take charge of America’s 15 intelligence agencies. The CIA and other agencies were criticized for failing to share information about hijackers entering the U.S. in the months leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

“I want, and every president must have, the best, unbiased, unvarnished assessment of America’s intelligence professionals,” Bush said in a Rose Garden news conference.

The president also endorsed another key recommendation in the Sept. 11 final report — a new National Counterterrorism Center to collect and analyze intelligence and coordinate the clandestine war on terror.

But Bush said he did not agree with the panel’s proposal to put the center and its overseer, the new intelligence czar, inside the White House — which Democratic challenger Sen. John Kerry supports.

“I don’t think that person ought to be a member of my Cabinet,” Bush said, adding that he wants to be able to “hire and fire” the official.

“I think it ought to be a stand-alone group, to better coordinate, particularly between foreign intelligence and domestic intelligence matters.”

Rep. Jane Harman, the top-ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said the president is starting the czar off from a position of weakness. “It will be crucial to give this NDI real budgetary and management authority. We shouldn’t repeat the mistakes of the drug czar,” said Harman, of California.

White House chief of staff Andrew Card countered that the director would have “an awful lot of input into the development of any budgets in the intelligence community.”

On other panel recommendations, Bush didn’t say he would fix the funding formula that doles out most federal cash to cities based on population instead of risk. The commission said New York and Washington were being shortchanged.

Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., will join with city cops and firefighters today on the steps of the New York Stock Exchange demanding Bush address the matter. “There is nothing stopping the president from ordering increased funding for those cities. He should act immediately,” she said in a statement.

To create the intelligence czar, the 1947 National Security Act will need a major overhaul by Congress. Still, Bush said he had no plans to call lawmakers back into special session during their August recess.

There may be major hurdles to creating the position, experts said, because U.S. agencies that collect overseas intelligence are now banned from spying on American soil.

The CIA and FBI abused their power in the 1960s by spying on Americans, and “that’s why Congress ought to go forward very, very carefully,” said Elizabeth Rindskopf Parker, an ex-general counsel for CIA and the National Security Agency.

Bush offered scant specifics on other recommendations by the Sept. 11 panel that he plans to adopt by executive order in coming days, including some that will “go further than the proposal of the commission’s report,” he said.

One such idea is a national center for weapons of mass destruction. “This nation must do everything we can to keep the world’s most destructive weapons out of the world’s most dangerous hands,” Bush said.