The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing April 30 on the subject of “secret law.”
“It’s been nearly forty years since Professor Kenneth Davis stated in his seminal treatise on administrative law that ‘Secret law is an abomination’,” according to a Committee announcement.
“The upcoming hearing will examine the extent to which this abomination is gradually becoming a common state of affairs, and its effect on our democracy.”
The hearing will be chaired by Sen. Russ Feingold. I will be testifying, along with J. William Leonard, the former director of the Information Security Oversight Office, and a diverse group of others. See “Secret Law and the Threat to Democratic and Accountable Government.”
The Federation of American Scientists supports H.R. 4420, the Cool Corridors Act of 2025, which would reauthorize the Healthy Streets program through 2030 and seeks to increase green and other shade infrastructure in high-heat areas.
The current lack of public trust in AI risks inhibiting innovation and adoption of AI systems, meaning new methods will not be discovered and new benefits won’t be felt. A failure to uphold high standards in the technology we deploy will also place our nation at a strategic disadvantage compared to our competitors.
Using the NIST as an example, the Radiation Physics Building (still without the funding to complete its renovation) is crucial to national security and the medical community. If it were to go down (or away), every medical device in the United States that uses radiation would be decertified within 6 months, creating a significant single point of failure that cannot be quickly mitigated.
The federal government can support more proactive, efficient, and cost-effective resiliency planning by certifying predictive models to validate and publicly indicate their quality.