Although the Department of Energy is not one of the agencies that performs intelligence surveillance or physical search under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, it does occasionally play a role in providing analytical support to other agencies such as the FBI that do conduct FISA surveillance.
A recent DOE Inspector General report (pdf) noted four cases that were “referred by the FBI [to the Department of Energy Office of Intelligence] for analysis of raw data collected under FISA court orders.” The report does not specify the nature of the raw data or the reason the four cases were referred to the Energy Department, though one may speculate that the data concerned nuclear weapons-related information rather than, say, novel designs for wind turbines.
No violations of law were found by the Inspector General, but the report said DOE improperly failed to respond to one of the four FBI FISA referrals for more than a year. See “Letter Report on “Selected Aspects of the Department of Energy’s Activities Involving the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,” DOE Inspector General, May 6, 2009.
January saw us watching whether the government would fund science. February has been about how that funding will be distributed, regulated, and contested.
This rule gives agencies significantly more authority over certain career policy roles. Whether that authority improves accountability or creates new risks depends almost entirely on how agencies interrupt and apply it.
Our environmental system was built for 1970s-era pollution control, but today it needs stable, integrated, multi-level governance that can make tradeoffs, share and use evidence, and deliver infrastructure while demonstrating that improved trust and participation are essential to future progress.
Durable and legitimate climate action requires a government capable of clearly weighting, explaining, and managing cost tradeoffs to the widest away of audiences, which in turn requires strong technocratic competency.