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.
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.