“If President Obama really welcomed a debate [on intelligence surveillance policy], there are all kinds of things he could do in terms of declassification and disclosure to foster it. But he’s not doing any of them.” At least that’s my perception. See Debate on Secret Data Looks Unlikely, Partly Due to Secrecy by Scott Shane and Jonathan Weisman, New York Times, June 11.
“As the administration and some in Congress vent their anger about leaks to The Post and to Britain’s Guardian newspaper, officials have only themselves to blame,” wrote Dana Milbank in the Washington Post today. “It is precisely their effort to hide such a vast and consequential program from the American public that caused this pressure valve to burst.” See Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks are the backlash of too much secrecy, June 11.
I discussed some aspects of the latest surveillance controversy on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal today.
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.
This runs counter to public opinion: 4 in 5 of all Americans, across party lines, want to see the government take stronger climate action.