The records of several noteworthy congressional hearings that were held in the past two years have been published in the last few weeks, including these:
“A Report Card on Homeland Security Information Sharing,” House Homeland Security Committee, September 24, 2008.
“Turning Spy Satellites on the Homeland: The Privacy and Civil Liberties Implications of the National Applications Office,” House Homeland Security Committee, September 6, 2007.
“Oversight of the Federal Bureau of Investigation” (pdf), Senate Judiciary Committee, March 27, 2007.
“FISA Amendments: How to Protect Americans’ Security and Privacy and Preserve the Rule of Law and Government Accountability,” October 31, 2007.
Sen. Patrick Leahy and Sen. Charles Grassley of the Senate Judiciary Committee wrote to Attorney General Holder (pdf) on October 20, asking the Department of Justice to comply with outstanding Committee requests for information that have gone unanswered, in some cases for several years.
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.