Army Directive Prohibits Retaliation for Reporting a Crime
The Secretary of the Army last week issued a directive specifying that retaliating against someone for reporting a crime is itself a crime.
“No Soldier may retaliate against a victim, an alleged victim or another member of the Armed Forces based on that individual’s report of a criminal offense,” the new Directive states. See Prohibition of Retaliation Against Soldiers for Reporting a Criminal Offense, Army Directive 2014-20, June 19, 2014.
Prohibited forms of retaliation include adverse personnel actions and ostracism, as well as “acts of cruelty, oppression or maltreatment.”
The directive implements a requirement that was enacted by Congress in the 2014 defense authorization act (section 1709) as part of a legislative response to instances of sexual assault in the military.
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.