A pending Senate bill would suspend funding for the Office of Vice President next year unless Vice President Cheney agrees to comply with the oversight provisions of the executive order on classification, something he claims he is not obliged to do.
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), chairman of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services, included language in the pending appropriations bill to suspend the funding after the Vice President failed to respond to the Senator’s June 25 letter (pdf) urging compliance with the executive order.
A similar measure to cut funding for the Office of Vice President, introduced in the House last month by Rep. Rahm Emanuel, was narrowly defeated on June 28 by a vote of 209-217.
J. William Leonard, the Information Security Oversight Office director whose oversight activities were rebuffed by the Office of Vice President, will testify tomorrow, July 12, at a House Intelligence Subcommittee hearing on classification policy. I will also be among the witnesses at the 1 PM hearing in Rayburn 2216.
In anticipation of future known and unknown health security threats, including new pandemics, biothreats, and climate-related health emergencies, our answers need to be much faster, cheaper, and less disruptive to other operations.
To unlock the full potential of artificial intelligence within the Department of Health and Human Services, an AI Corps should be established, embedding specialized AI experts within each of the department’s 10 agencies.
Investing in interventions behind the walls is not just a matter of improving conditions for incarcerated individuals—it is a public safety and economic imperative. By reducing recidivism through education and family contact, we can improve reentry outcomes and save billions in taxpayer dollars.
The U.S. government should establish a public-private National Exposome Project (NEP) to generate benchmark human exposure levels for the ~80,000 chemicals to which Americans are regularly exposed.