Parade Magazine, the Sunday supplement that is inserted into newspapers all over the country, turned its attention last week from celebrity romance and dieting tips to the problem of government secrecy.
“Concerns about overclassification cut across ideological and party lines,” according to Parade.
“Besides alienating Americans from their government, the result is that many debates today are little more than rhetoric and smears, because information explaining how a policy was decided isn’t available.”
The Parade article serves as a kind of overture to Sunshine Week, March 13-17, which is an initiative by media organizations and others to focus public attention on the defects of unchecked government secrecy.
See “Are They Taking Away Our Freedoms?” by Lyric Wallwork Winik, Parade, February 26.
This rule gives agencies significantly more authority over certain career policy roles. Whether that authority improves accountability or creates new risks depends almost entirely on how agencies interrupt and apply it.
Our environmental system was built for 1970s-era pollution control, but today it needs stable, integrated, multi-level governance that can make tradeoffs, share and use evidence, and deliver infrastructure while demonstrating that improved trust and participation are essential to future progress.
Durable and legitimate climate action requires a government capable of clearly weighting, explaining, and managing cost tradeoffs to the widest away of audiences, which in turn requires strong technocratic competency.
FAS is launching the Center for Regulatory Ingenuity (CRI) to build a new, transpartisan vision of government that works – that has the capacity to achieve ambitious goals while adeptly responding to people’s basic needs.