One new feature of the intelligence budgeting process is the mandatory public disclosure of “earmarks” — funds that are specifically requested by an individual member of Congress and designated for a particular program.
The disclosures shed at least a few photons worth of new light on the deliberately obscure intelligence budget.
More than two dozen earmarks, from the $500,000 for a “Behavior Pattern Training Recognition Program” requested by Rep. Ed Pastor (D-AZ) to the $23 million for the National Drug Intelligence Center requested by Rep. John Murtha (D-PA), are itemized in the printed (or PDF) version of the House Intelligence Committee report on the FY 2008 Intelligence Authorization Act (pdf) (at pp. 50-51).
Declining U.S. manufacturing has sharply curtailed a key path to the middle class for those with high school educations or less, thereby exacerbating income inequality nationwide. The United States can address many of these problems through concerted efforts in advanced manufacturing.
The research community lacks strategies to incentivize collaboration on high-quality data acquisition and sharing. The government should fund collaborative roadmapping, certification, collection, and sharing of large, high-quality datasets in life science.
The potential of new nuclear power plants to meet energy demand, increase energy security, and revitalize local economies depends on new regulatory and operational approaches at the NRC.
In anticipation of future known and unknown health security threats, including new pandemics, biothreats, and climate-related health emergencies, our answers need to be much faster, cheaper, and less disruptive to other operations.