Having spent months assessing the role of contractors in U.S. intelligence agencies, U.S. intelligence officials say they cannot disclose how many contractors there are, because that’s classified. See “Government Keeps a Secret After Studying Spy Agencies” by Scott Shane, New York Times, April 26.
Veteran female intelligence officers charge that the Central Intelligence Agency deals more harshly with women employees who have relationships with foreign nationals than it does with men. See “Does the CIA have a double standard when its spies cozy up to foreigners?” by David E. Kaplan, U.S. News and World Report, April 22.
A tumultuous congressional hearing on the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program was captured by Jeff Stein in “A CIA Man Speaks His Mind on Secret Abductions,” CQ Homeland Security, April 20.
In 1967 the United States had a top secret contingency plan for attacking Israel to prevent it from moving westward into the Sinai or eastward into the West Bank, reported Amir Oren in Haaretz. See “The Right to Strike,” April 23.
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.