A new assessment of internal Pakistani affairs and U.S.-Pakistan relations was prepared by the Congressional Research Service in “Pakistan: Key Current Issues and Developments” (pdf), June 1, 2010.
An Inspector General Report on the FBI’s use of so-called “exigent letters” was examined in an April 14, 2010 hearing of the House Judiciary Committee that has just been published.
The inadvertent disclosure last year of a Transportation Security Administration security manual was discussed at another newly published hearing of the House Homeland Security Committee. See “Has the TSA Breach Jeopardized National Security? An Examination of What Happened and Why,” December 16, 2009.
The National Archives Richard Nixon Library announced that it will release tomorrow a large cache of Nixon presidential records, mainly from the files of the late Senator Daniel P. Moynihan. The release notably includes 5,000 pages of declassified national security records including “U.S. intelligence assessments before and during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War,… materials relating to US-UK relations, including correspondence between President Nixon and Prime Minister Edward Heath; backchannel Soviet-Israeli relations; the status of Berlin; Soviet strategic weapons; and the Vietnam War.”
The private Nixontapes.org has prepared a new set of transcriptions of Nixon White House tapes pertaining to U.S. policy towards Chile’s Salvador Allende in 1970-73, prior to his ouster (and death) in a military coup.
January saw us watching whether the government would fund science. February has been about how that funding will be distributed, regulated, and contested.
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.