The Director of National Intelligence last month issued a new directive on Controlled Access Programs (CAPs).
CAPs are the Intelligence Community equivalent of what are otherwise called Special Access Programs (SAPs). These are classified programs that involve access restrictions above and beyond ordinary classification controls. CAPs include compartmented intelligence programs, but are not limited to them.
The new directive, Intelligence Community Directive 906, establishes the policy framework for management and oversight of Controlled Access Programs. The directive itself is unclassified.
Using the NIST as an example, the Radiation Physics Building (still without the funding to complete its renovation) is crucial to national security and the medical community. If it were to go down (or away), every medical device in the United States that uses radiation would be decertified within 6 months, creating a significant single point of failure that cannot be quickly mitigated.
The federal government can support more proactive, efficient, and cost-effective resiliency planning by certifying predictive models to validate and publicly indicate their quality.
We need a new agency that specializes in uncovering funding opportunities that were overlooked elsewhere. Judging from the history of scientific breakthroughs, the benefits could be quite substantial.
The cost of inaction is not merely economic; it is measured in preventable illness, deaths and diminished livelihoods.