The latest products from the Congressional Research Service include these reports:
Gun Control Proposals in the 113th Congress: Universal Background Checks, Gun Trafficking, and Military Style Firearms, March 1, 2013
Party Leaders in the United States Congress, 1789-2013, March 4, 2013
Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs: Status of the Integrated Electronic Health Record (iEHR), February 26, 2013
Environmental Regulation and Agriculture, February 22, 2013
Oil Sands and the Keystone XL Pipeline: Background and Selected Environmental Issues, February 21, 2013
A bill was introduced today by Reps. Leonard Lance (R-NJ) and Mike Quigley (D-IL) that would facilitate public access to CRS reports without the need for subterfuge, unauthorized access, or payment of fees to private vendors. Similar legislative efforts in the past have repeatedly been rejected. See “It’s Time to Give the Public Access to CRS Reports” by Matthew Rumsey, Sunlight Foundation, March 7.
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.
FAS is launching the Center for Regulatory Ingenuity (CRI) to build a new, transpartisan vision of government that works – that has the capacity to achieve ambitious goals while adeptly responding to people’s basic needs.