A bill to amend and strengthen the Whistleblower Protection Act was introduced yesterday by Senator Daniel Akaka (D-HI) and several bipartisan Senate colleagues.
“Our legislation ensures that Federal whistleblowers are protected from retaliatory action when notifying the public and government leaders of waste, fraud, and abuse,” Senator Akaka said.
“If we fail to protect whistleblowers, then our efforts to improve government management, protect the public, and secure the nation will also fail.”
See Introduction of the “Federal Employee Protection of Disclosures Act,” January 11.
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.