Secrecy News was sad to learn that Lee S. Strickland, a former Central Intelligence Agency official, died on January 23.
We first encountered him perhaps 15 years ago when he was the head of the CIA Freedom of Information office, where he used to reliably deny our FOIA requests. Over the years he seemed to enlarge his horizons and to admit the possibility of contrasting views. He taught his students at the University of Maryland that information policy could be exciting as well as important. And he was a nice guy.
See this obituary for Lee Strickland from the University of Maryland College of Information Studies.
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.