New legislation to restore due process protections for federal employees who serve in “sensitive” positions was introduced last week by Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton. Her bill was prompted by a widely criticized court ruling last August (in Kaplan v. Conyers and MSPB) that effectively stripped existing protections from such employees.
The latest annual report from Openthegovernment.org examines the most recent indicators of secrecy in the federal government, noting continuing difficulty in curbing national security secrecy.
A new report from the Committee to Protect Journalists on “The Obama Administration and the Press” says that “government officials are increasingly afraid to talk to the press” due to invasive and punitive responses to unauthorized disclosures.
A new book on Lee Harvey Oswald’s sojourn in the Soviet Union was reviewed by Priscilla Johnson McMillan in Max Holland’s Washington Decoded. Ms. McMillan, author of the genuinely extraordinary 1977 volume Marina and Lee (reissued last summer), must be the only person ever to have known both JFK and Oswald. In her book review, she finds significant virtues and faults in the new book, The Interloper by Peter Savodnik.
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.
The energy transition underway in the United States continues to present a unique set of opportunities to put Americans back to work through the deployment of new technologies, infrastructure, energy efficiency, and expansion of the electricity system to meet our carbon goals.
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.