Last year the National Academy of Public Administration developed a proposal to perform an “ethics audit” of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The proposal was a response, at NIH’s request, to persistent concerns from members of Congress and others that numerous NIH employees had conflicts of interest arising from their compensated activities outside of the agency.
Rumor had it that the resulting NAPA proposal contained in a January 2006 report was “not what NIH wanted, so they simply buried the paper after it was given to the Director.”
“One of the … people who felt it got deep-sixed thought it would be of interest to the NIH research community,” a friendly tipster wrote.
Secrecy News requested the document under the Freedom of Information Act, and it was promptly released by NIH.
See “Enhancing Risk Management at the National Institutes of Health Through an Audit of the Ethics Program,” prepared by a National Academy of Public Administration Staff Study Team, January 2006 (4 MB PDF file).
In recent months, we’ve seen much of these decades’ worth of progress erased. Contracts for evaluations of government programs were canceled, FFRDCs have been forced to lay off staff, and federal advisory committees have been disbanded.
This report outlines a framework relying on “Cooperative Technical Means” for effective arms control verification based on remote sensing, avoiding on-site inspections but maintaining a level of transparency that allows for immediate detection of changes in nuclear posture or a significant build-up above agreed limits.
At a recent workshop, we explored the nature of trust in specific government functions, the risk and implications of breaking trust in those systems, and how we’d known we were getting close to specific trust breaking points.
tudents in the 21st century need strong critical thinking skills like reasoning, questioning, and problem-solving, before they can meaningfully engage with more advanced domains like digital, data, or AI literacy.