The U.S. State Department last month published four new volumes of its official Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series, documenting the foreign relations of the Nixon Administration:
Inevitably, it seems, the occasional error creeps in.
Document 13 of the China volume transcribes a February 18, 1973 conversation between Chinese Premier Chou En-lai and Henry Kissinger in which Chou cited press reports that “the United States had contacts with Ismail” (on page 148). The FRUS editors inserted Footnote 3 explaining that “Ismail Fahmi was the Egyptian Minister for Foreign Affairs from 1973 until 1977.” That’s true, but that’s not who Premier Chou was talking about. “It is common knowledge that Chou was referring to Sadat’s national security adviser — Hafez Ismail,” wrote A, a Secrecy News correspondent.
No one will be surprised if we end up with a continuing resolution to push our shutdown deadline out past the midterms, so the real question is what else will they get done this summer?
Rebuilding public participation starts with something simple — treating the public not as a problem to manage, but as a source of ingenuity government cannot function without.
If the government wants a system of learning and adaptation that improves results in real time, it has to treat translation, utilization, and adaptation as core functions of governance rather than as afterthoughts.
Coordination among federal science agencies is essential to ensure government-wide alignment on R&D investment priorities. However, the federal R&D enterprise suffers from egregious siloization.