Earlier this year, the Department of Defense classified the schedule of flight tests of ballistic missile defense systems, even though such information had previously been unclassified and publicly disclosed.
Rejecting that move, Congress has now told the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency that the flight test schedule must be unclassified.
A new provision in the FY2019 national defense authorization act (sect. 1681) would “require that MDA make the quarter and fiscal year for execution of planned flight tests unclassified.”
“Together with the release of each integrated master test plan of the Missile Defense Agency, and at the same time as each budget of the President is submitted to Congress…, the Director of the Missile Defense Agency shall make publicly available a version of each such plan that identifies the fiscal year and the fiscal quarter in which events under the plan will occur,” the provision states.
This legislative action will effectively override the classification judgment of the executive branch. That is something that Congress rarely does and that the executive branch regards as an infringement on its authority.
Good information sources, like collections, must be available and maintained if companies are going to successfully implement the vision of AI for science expressed by their marketing and executives.
Let’s see what rules we can rewrite and beliefs we can reset: a few digital service sacred cows are long overdue to be put out to pasture.
Nestled in the cuts and investments of interest to the S&T community is a more complex story of how the administration is approaching the practice of science diplomacy.
Surprise! It’s a double album drop with the release of both the President’s Budget Request (PBR to us, not Pabst Blue Ribbon) and the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Budget Justification for Fiscal Year 2027 (FY27) last Friday.