“Evidently $30 million and 10 years wasn’t enough to finish the job of declassifying records on the involvement of U.S. intelligence agencies with Nazi and Japanese war criminals,” writes Jeff Stein in CQ Spy Talk. “Congress has just budgeted another $650,000 to finish the job — really, they’re serious this time — of poring through some 8 million postwar pages.” See “The Really Longest War: U.S. Still Spending on Nazi War Docs,” March 3.
“The Navy has classified regular reports about the material condition of its fleet, an about-face from when the reports were accessible as public documents under the Freedom of Information Act,” reports Philip Ewing in Navy Times. See “Navy Classifies Ship Inspection Reports,” February 27.
“The Association of Health Care Journalists has urged President Barack Obama to end inherited policies that require public affairs officers to approve journalists’ interviews with federal staff.”
“The military is investigating how a secret briefing about national security got posted on the Web, including information about 93 tunnels found along the nation’s borders and a warning that Canada could become a terrorist gateway,” wrote Pam Zubeck in the Colorado Springs Gazette. See “Military probes how secret briefing wound up on Web,” February 28.
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.