The Government Accountability Office is among the most potent and productive tools of government oversight available. Perhaps for that reason, U.S. intelligence agencies have been reluctant to cooperate with GAO investigations.
Sen. Daniel Akaka introduced legislation last year to reaffirm GAO authority to investigate intelligence agency activities, and that legislation was the subject of a Senate hearing in February. All of the witnesses, including myself (pdf) and then-GAO Comptroller General David M. Walker (pdf), urged an increased role for GAO in intelligence oversight.
See the record of the February 29, 2008 hearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on “Government-Wide Intelligence Community Management Reforms.”
As of March 2008, there were 1,000 GAO employees with Top Secret security clearances out of 3,153 total staff. Of those, 73 held SCI (“sensitive compartmented information”) clearances for access to intelligence information, according to a GAO letter supplied for the hearing record (pdf).
A bill adopted last week in the House, called the “Government Accountability Office Improvement Act” (HR 6388) did not explicitly address intelligence oversight by GAO.
With targeted policy interventions, we can efficiently and effectively support the U.S. innovation economy through the translation of breakthrough scientific research from the lab to the market.
Crowd forecasting methods offer a systematic approach to quantifying the U.S. intelligence community’s uncertainty about the future and predicting the impact of interventions, allowing decision-makers to strategize effectively and allocate resources by outlining risks and tradeoffs in a legible format.
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The United States has the only proven and scalable tritium production supply chain, but it is largely reserved for nuclear weapons. Excess tritium production capacity should be leveraged to ensure the success of and U.S. leadership in fusion energy.