Commercial vendors will happily sell you almost any Congressional Research Service report issued in the last decade, making CRS secrecy profitable for some but otherwise pointless. Yet Congress has stubbornly told the CRS not to make its reports directly available to the taxpaying public, who have already paid for them once.
Some recent CRS reports that are not otherwise freely available in public databases include the following (all pdf).
“Steel: Price and Policy Issues,” updated August 31, 2006.
“U.S. Strategic Nuclear Forces: Background, Developments, and Issues,” September 8, 2006.
“Federal Counter-Terrorism Training: Issues for Congressional Oversight,” August 31, 2006.
“Navy Aircraft Carriers: Proposed Retirement of USS John F. Kennedy — Issues and Options for Congress,” updated August 29, 2006.
“Free Mail for Troops Overseas,” updated August 22, 2006.
No one will be surprised if we end up with a continuing resolution to push our shutdown deadline out past the midterms, so the real question is what else will they get done this summer?
Rebuilding public participation starts with something simple — treating the public not as a problem to manage, but as a source of ingenuity government cannot function without.
If the government wants a system of learning and adaptation that improves results in real time, it has to treat translation, utilization, and adaptation as core functions of governance rather than as afterthoughts.
Coordination among federal science agencies is essential to ensure government-wide alignment on R&D investment priorities. However, the federal R&D enterprise suffers from egregious siloization.