Pending legislation to reform the use of the state secrets privilege received a wave of support last week from numerous public interest, professional and civil liberties organizations.
While the bill is opposed by the Attorney General, it received strong endorsements from the American Bar Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Brennan Center for Justice, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Constitution Project and others. See their statements and responses to the Attorney General’s March 31 letter on the subject here.
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.