A statutory limit on total federal debt has been in place since 1917. In the past decade, Congress has voted to raise the debt limit ten times and it will now have to do so once again.
The history of the debt limit and its current implications were discussed in a recently updated report from the Congressional Research Service. See “The Debt Limit: History and Recent Increases” (pdf), March 7, 2011. And see, relatedly, “Reaching the Debt Limit: Background and Potential Effects on Government Operations,” February 11, 2011.
Reports from the Congressional Research Service have become such an integral part of the national policymaking process that two CRS reports were cited this month in an opinion (pdf) issued by the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel concerning the President’s constitutional authority to use military force in Libya.
One of the reports addressed “Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2010” and the other was on “Haiti: Developments and U.S. Policy Since 1991 and Current Congressional Concerns.”
Remarkably, however, neither of the CRS reports that was cited in the OLC opinion is available on any congressional website, since Congress stubbornly opposes direct public access to CRS products. To find them online, one must turn to non-congressional websites.
tudents in the 21st century need strong critical thinking skills like reasoning, questioning, and problem-solving, before they can meaningfully engage with more advanced domains like digital, data, or AI literacy.
When the U.S. government funds the establishment of a platform for testing hundreds of behavioral interventions on a large diverse population, we will start to better understand the interventions that will have an efficient and lasting impact on health behavior.
The grant comes from the Carnegie Corporation of New York (CCNY) to investigate, alongside The British American Security Information Council (BASIC), the associated impact on nuclear stability.
We need to overhaul the standardized testing and score reporting system to be more accessible to all of the end users of standardized tests: educators, students, and their families.