One new feature of the intelligence budgeting process is the mandatory public disclosure of “earmarks” — funds that are specifically requested by an individual member of Congress and designated for a particular program.
The disclosures shed at least a few photons worth of new light on the deliberately obscure intelligence budget.
More than two dozen earmarks, from the $500,000 for a “Behavior Pattern Training Recognition Program” requested by Rep. Ed Pastor (D-AZ) to the $23 million for the National Drug Intelligence Center requested by Rep. John Murtha (D-PA), are itemized in the printed (or PDF) version of the House Intelligence Committee report on the FY 2008 Intelligence Authorization Act (pdf) (at pp. 50-51).
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.