When a military judge ruled last month that Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a former driver for Osama bin Laden, could be tried for war crimes, the first footnote in his July 14 opinion (pdf) was to a Congressional Research Service report. (Hamdan was convicted yesterday for material support of terrorism.)
But Military Judge Keith J. Allred, lacking an official source for the CRS analysis by Jennifer K. Elsea (with which he ultimately differed), provided a link instead (see footnote 1 on page 3) to a copy of the document on the Federation of American Scientists web site.
By doing so, the Judge simultaneously highlighted the centrality of such CRS analyses to public discourse and the strange fact that these official documents are still not approved for direct release to the public.
Perhaps he also implicitly affirmed that FAS and other public interest publishers of CRS collections are helping to compensate for that continuing policy defect by providing the online access to CRS reports that Congress has denied.
Given the unreliability of private market funding for agricultural biotechnology R&D, substantial federal funding through research programs such as AgARDA is vital for accelerating R&D.
“Given the number of existential crises we must collectively confront, I have found policy entrepreneurship to be a fruitful avenue towards doing some of that work.”
We sit on the verge of another Presidential election – an opportunity for meaningful, science-based policy innovations that can appeal to lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
Outdated Bureau of Labor Statistics classifications hampers the federal government’s ability to design and implement effective policies for emerging technologies sectors.