F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Program, and More from CRS
Congress continues to instruct the Congressional Research Service not to make its products directly available to the public without prior approval.
“No funds in the Congressional Research Service can be used to publish or prepare material to be issued by the Library of Congress unless approved by the appropriate committees,” according to language in the latest House report on Legislative Branch Appropriations for FY 2015.
But since no CRS funds are being expended to make the following reports available to the public, the letter of the law is fulfilled.
F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) Program: Background and Issues for Congress, April 29, 2014
Defense Surplus Equipment Disposal: Background Information, April 29, 2014
Congressional Primer on Responding to Major Disasters and Emergencies, April 30, 2014
Immigration Policies and Issues on Health-Related Grounds for Exclusion, April 28, 2014
NAFTA at 20: Overview and Trade Effects, April 28, 2014
Multilateral Development Banks: How the United States Makes and Implements Policy, April 29, 2014
Changes in the Arctic: Background and Issues for Congress, April 28, 2014
Arms Control and Nonproliferation: A Catalog of Treaties and Agreements, April 28, 2014
Iran’s Nuclear Program: Tehran’s Compliance with International Obligations, April 28, 2014
No Remedy for Drone Deaths, CRS Legal Sidebar, April 30, 2014
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.
We need a new agency that specializes in uncovering funding opportunities that were overlooked elsewhere. Judging from the history of scientific breakthroughs, the benefits could be quite substantial.