“It is an abuse of the classification process to withhold from Congress and the people of the United States broad assessments of the extent of corruption in the Iraqi Government.”
Remarkably, that complaint was endorsed Tuesday by a large majority of the House of Representatives, which voted 395-21 to condemn the Administration’s restrictions on disclosure of information about Iraqi corruption.
The resolution condemning the restrictions, sponsored by Rep. Henry Waxman, emerged from the conflict between his Oversight Committee and the State Department over access to and disclosure of government records on this topic. See the October 16 floor debate on House Resolution 734.
One of the assessments of Iraqi corruption that was retroactively classified after Rep. Waxman’s committee requested it has been made widely available (pdf) on the Federation of American Scientists web site.
State Department official David Satterfield disputed allegations that the Department had improperly withheld information in an October 16 conference call.
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.